The start-up is struggling with rising prices on the electricity exchanges.
(Photo: Tibber)
Dusseldorf The Norwegian start-up Tibber raises 100 million dollars in a new financing round. The largest investor is the billion-dollar fund Summa Equity. The digital electricity provider wants to use the money to invest in the expansion of its existing markets – including in Germany.
“We will launch our own hardware called Pulse in the course of this year,” announces Marion Nöldgen, Head of Tibber Germany. If you put the device on a digital electricity meter, you should be able to transmit and view your electricity consumption in real time. This should finally make it possible to offer hourly tariffs in Germany and accelerate growth in this country.
The ambitious promise: Tibber offers green electricity at a purchase price. The company itself takes no margin. The electricity price is adjusted hourly and passed directly to the consumer. He can then decide for himself at what price he turns on the washing machine or charges the electric car at the cheapest rate. Tibber has had great success with it in his home country of Norway. In total, the young company now has more than 400,000 customers. The business model is geared towards the future.
Where there used to be a few large power plants, there are now thousands of individual plants spread across the country. Meanwhile, power consumption is increasing: e-cars want to be charged, smartphones are constantly plugged into the socket, even the heating is increasingly running on electricity. When it comes to energy transition and smart power consumption, Scandinavia is already much further ahead than Germany.
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Since Tibber also entered the coveted German market in mid-2020, the start-up has naturally found it somewhat more difficult with the slowly advancing digitization and the e-car boom that is just beginning in this country.
Hope for falling electricity prices
Because only those who also have a smart meter gateway, i.e. an intelligently communicating electricity meter, benefit from flexible electricity tariffs. Otherwise you don’t pay more with Tibber, but you don’t pay less either.
Quite the opposite: Because the business model is based on passing on the fluctuations in exchange electricity prices to its customers, Tibber’s prices aren’t exactly the cheapest at the moment. The new hardware could solve the problem of the lack of digitization in most German households. But with the current stock market prices, that should only convince a few as an argument.
“Tibber customers notice the price fluctuations earlier than most, because we buy the required amounts of electricity on the day-ahead spot market. The prices there have indeed risen significantly on average in the last few days,” admits Nöldgen. However, no supplier could permanently offer an electricity tariff below the market price. “We are therefore assuming that there will be a new wave of price increases”, to which customers are then contractually bound for longer on average. If the prices drop again, Tibber customers will benefit first again, assures Nöldgen.
>> Read here: Half-hearted start: energy companies criticize the German smart meter strategy
For example, from the surcharge for renewable energies (EEG), which will no longer apply from July. It is currently just under four cents, but in the worst case it could be completely eaten up by rising electricity prices against the background of the Ukraine war. One megawatt hour of electricity currently costs over EUR 390 on the European EEX exchange. In January, this price was still 198 euros.
Electricity prices are high, most consumers are not in a mood to change, and German households are often not digital enough to benefit from flexible tariffs. Not an easy time for young, digital electricity start-ups like Tibber.
More: Intelligent grids, short-term storage, power-to-gas – these technologies are crucial for the climate transition
