“Taxes and fees on power price reach record level in 2017”

German power customers will pay more than 35 billion euros in taxes, fees, and surcharges with their electricity bills in 2017, the utilities lobby German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) writes in a press release. “This is more than three times the amount the federal government plans to invest in roads, railways and waterways” in that year, BDEW’s chairman Stefan Kapferer said. According to the BDEW, government levies such as the EEG surcharge will account for 54 percent of the power price in 2017 while the share influenceable by energy providers currently stands at only 22 percent.
The EEG surcharge is often used as a price-tag for the Energiewende, which critics say is inappropriate. They argue that the surcharge is strongly influenced by wholesale power prices and reflected neither many cost savings and benefits elsewhere nor other costs of the energy transition policy.

See the press release in German here and the BDEW’s power price analysis for November here.

For background on the Energiewende’s effect on power customers’ electricity bills, see the CLEW factsheet What German households pay for power.