Stromio contracts terminated – customers fall into basic service

Stromio mother holding building

Dusseldorf Stromio can no longer supply its customers. Drastically increased energy prices are forcing the nationwide electricity provider to give up. After the green electricity provider Enqu, Gas.de, Otima Energie, the Rheinische Elektrizitäts- und Gasversorgungsgesellschaft with the brands “Immergrün” and “Meisterstrom” and the Bayerische Energieversorgungsgesellschaft (BEV), another of the large cheap electricity and gas providers is caught. For low-priced energy discounters, the situation on the market is increasingly worsening.

However, customers do not have to worry about bottlenecks: With the end of supply by Stromio, the company transfers its customers to the local replacement supply. This means that the households affected automatically slip into the supply of the local basic supplier, which is often the municipal utilities.

According to the dpa news agency, it is currently not known how many customers are affected. “In our control area, the balancing group contracts were terminated extraordinarily.”, The network operator 50Hertz confirmed the Handelsblatt on request. This has been the case since midnight on Wednesday morning.

The balancing group contracts regulate the supply of the energy suppliers for the respective market area. If the low-cost provider cannot fulfill the obligations of the balancing group contract, it will be terminated. According to the dpa, the termination was also confirmed by Amprion, TransnetBW and Tennet.

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The current situation is critical for low-cost electricity providers because the company’s concept no longer works in the EU-wide energy crisis: the prices for gas and electricity have climbed to record levels. “There is definitely a causal connection between the high gas prices and the high electricity prices on the exchange – due to the supply bottlenecks that we are currently experiencing on the gas markets,” said a spokesman for the transition network operator 50Hertz.

Low-cost discounters are in dire straits

Short-term electricity purchases turned out to be a price advantage for companies before the energy crisis. The business model: make a bargain at the last second and deliver to customers cheaply. Exploding energy prices on the spot market, i.e. the market where discounters buy energy at short notice, surprised the low-cost providers.

Afterwards, the electricity suppliers only had two options: to increase the actually low prices extremely – or to terminate the supply contracts with their customers from one day to the next.

In the middle of the heating season, a sister company of Stromio, the energy discounter Gas.de, had already stopped delivering at the beginning of December. The joint brand “Grünwelt Energie” from Stromio and Gas.de was also affected. Gas.de cited the current price explosion in energy purchasing as a reason.

Stromio and Gas.de have the same managing director and belong to the Dutch Callax group of companies through several intermediate companies.

More: Another energy provider stops deliveries – what consumers need to know now

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