If you want to be warm in winter but have gas heating in the basement, it could be expensive for you.
(Photo: obs)
Anyone who has gas heating in the basement could have to dig deep into their pockets this winter. Because the price of natural gas is going through the roof, consumers must also expect significantly higher costs.
In Italy, customers have to pay 31 percent more for gas than they did four months ago, in France prices rose by around ten percent year-on-year – despite government regulation – and many suppliers in Germany have already announced price increases of up to twelve percent. However, this is only partly due to the global market situation. Companies bet on lower prices and lost.
On the one hand, the energy companies: They waited too long to refill their storage facilities. From May, when the German deposits were only 25 percent full, they could have bought more quickly. But the price of 25 euros per megawatt hour was already relatively expensive for the time of year. It is hoped that prices will definitely go down a bit in the summer. So you waited. And the gas was getting more and more expensive.
At the beginning of August, the filling levels of the German natural gas storage facilities had only climbed to 50 percent. The gas price was still rising. A month later to a little over 60. Now the energy companies have to buy the expensive gas for better or worse – after all, winter is approaching. And that could drive the price even higher, depending on the weather.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Buying as quickly as possible in order to really be able to react to the last price fluctuation is also part of the purchasing strategy for suppliers. German providers hedge themselves quite well with futures contracts. If the price had been rising for months, one would have had to buy more natural gas here too early on. The companies gambled away. It’s just stupid that the consumer has to foot the bill. Especially against the background of the politically desired increase in the price of fossil fuels due to the CO2 price. That comes on top of that too.
The gas traders pass the high prices on to the suppliers and those to the consumer. It is of course quite inconvenient that almost half of all German households heat their apartments with natural gas. In the first half of the year, another 320,000 new gas heating systems were added. Now the sensibility of purchasing a new fossil heating system could perhaps be fundamentally questioned nowadays.
More: High prices and fear of a “heatout” in winter: that’s how secure Germany’s gas supply is