16.10.2023
Source: Energy & Management Powernews
The Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs and the grid operator Bayernwerk demand subsidies from the federal government also for the distribution grids. The transmission networks get 5.5 billion euros for 2024.
The Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs and the grid operator Bayernwerk demand federal subsidies also for the power distribution networks. The transmission grids get 5.5 billion euros for 2024. This increased their fees only by 2.2 percent. For this year, the federal government had even injected almost 13 billion euros because electricity costs for grid stabilization and redispatch had almost tripled during the energy price crisis. Such costs have however also the distribution network operators.
Therefore the Bavarian ministry of economics demanded now also federal subsidies for the distribution networks. This demand has joined the large gas and electricity network operator Bayernwerk. The network subsidiary Bayernwerk Netz would have to increase the distribution network fees for 2024 by 15 to 19 percent, primarily because of the enormous photovoltaic expansion. Overall, the network fees contribute to about one fifth of the end customer electricity price.
The CEO of Bayernwerk AG, Egon Leo Westphal, justified the fee increase: "The transformation of our energy system with a strongly increasing share of decentralized generation plants and the electrification of industry, heat and transport requires an immense network expansion." In addition, he said, the transport of electricity via line systems is associated with a physical loss of energy. To compensate for this, network operators have to procure so-called loss energy on the market.
Cost limitation also makes sense in the distribution network
The procurement costs for this have risen sharply on the energy markets, he said. In order to have a containing effect on the development of the distribution network fees in the transformation, Westphal sees the political procedure on the level of the transmission system operators as a good example. He says this is also useful and important for distribution grids. "The distribution grids collect the renewable energies and implement the energy transition with the people," Westphal argued.
His company must invest in grid expansion with foresight, he said, both to cope with the increasing number of grid connection requests and to develop the energy grids for Bavaria's climate neutrality. The dynamics in the Bayernwerk grid are enormous, he said. "In the meantime, we have connected more than 425,000 PV systems to the Bayernwerk grid and many thousands of requests per month are newly added," said the Bayernwerk CEO.
Relating to the electricity grid fee increases of Bayernwerk Netz, Westphal emphasized that the grid fees of the Bayernwerk grid subsidiary were at a comparatively low level due to the highest efficiency values in the past. According to the calculations currently available, the increase in grid charges for an average household with an electricity consumption of 3,500 kWh amounts to around 60 euros a year. By contrast, the network fees for the Bayernwerk gas network are falling, partly due to lower costs from upstream networks, Westphal said.
Author: Susanne Harmsen
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