Left Party Demands State Control of Energy Market after Price Swings
After the strong price fluctuations with high electricity prices in December, the Left Party is calling for a state control authority for the energy market.
The announcement of the Federal Cartel Office, which will more closely scrutinize the formation of prices on the electricity market, is correct and overdue, said Co-Party Leader Jan van Aken to the “Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland”. “This alone will not be enough in the long run: it needs clear rules and strong control, which intervenes immediately when the companies are ripping us off” he added.
In a concept paper that van Aken will present in Berlin on Monday and which the RND reported, the Left Party is calling for the establishment of a price authority through the next federal government. “It needs a price supervision, which is directly subordinate to the Ministry of Economics” it says. “This authority should constantly monitor the prices on the energy market and intervene immediately if companies drive up prices – not just in Germany, but across Europe.”
Since wind and solar power plants generated little electricity in mid-December, the stock prices temporarily rose to record highs of up to 400 percent of the normal price. Industry observers had suspected that the companies were deliberately driving up the stock price by holding back the production of their coal-fired power plants, which are supposed to compensate for the shortage during a power outage.
The Left Party therefore demands state interventions: “There must be no arbitrary price increases for basic needs” it says in van Aken’s paper. “Whoever raises prices must prove that it is justified.”
To enable “social tariffs for basic consumption of electricity and gas” and “to protect against artificial price increases” the authority must also set a “fair base tariff for everyone” that is only exceeded by additional payments. This would be “socially just and climate-friendly.” The Left Party also wants to finance the expansion of renewable energies and a social compensation with a windfall profits tax on the companies’ crisis profits.