Stadtwerke Dreieich benefit from rising energy prices

• fromAnnette Schlegl

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More and more low-cost energy providers are terminating their customers’ contracts. As in Dreieich, the municipal utilities step in as the basic supplier for those who have been terminated.

Stadtwerke Dreieich is currently getting a surprisingly large number of visitors. The turbulence in the market for electricity and gas means that low-cost providers stop supplying their customers with energy and terminate their contracts. The skyrocketing procurement prices on the energy exchanges also brought some of these energy discounters into a tailspin; they had to file for bankruptcy. The municipal utilities are now catching these abandoned customers.

“Calls from unsettled and terminated customers to the municipal utilities are currently increasing in both sectors,” says sales manager Vladan Wujic. In more than 140 households and businesses, the GmbH has already jumped into the breach as a substitute, it said on Friday in a message. The supplier, who should have supplied all schools in the Offenbach district from 2022, has also collapsed financially.

Stadtwerke is the basic supplier of electricity and gas in the Dreieich urban area. They are therefore obliged to step in as suppliers of household customers if their contractual partner can no longer supply energy.

One or the other energy supplier is also no longer accepting new customers, says Wujic. He reports on his research in a comparison portal, where the kilowatt hour of electricity was offered for expensive 74 cents. “This provider probably doesn’t want to have any more new contracts,” says Wujic. For comparison: Stadtwerke Dreieich charge 31.20 cents per kilowatt hour for the basic supply .; there are even cheaper variants with different runtime models.

Electricity and gas discounters often buy the energy for their customers at short notice on the energy exchange. There they have to pay top prices at the moment, but cannot pass these costs on directly. Municipal utilities, on the other hand, are securing electricity and gas quantities successively years in advance at fixed prices in order to survive periods of high prices. “All municipal utilities have the public mandate to reliably supply the citizens with electricity and gas, and in some cases also water,” says Wujic. “You can therefore not buy risk-free.”