Energy Monitoring Report 2015 published by the Bundesnetzagentur and the Bundeskartellamt

The Bundesnetzagentur and the Bundeskartellamt today published their joint Monitoring Report 2015 on the main developments in the German electricity and gas markets. Publication of the report marks continuation of the close cooperation between the Bundesnetzagentur and the Bundeskartellamt in monitoring and analysing trends in these markets.

Andreas Mundt, Bundeskartellamt President, said: "Electricity consumers are benefiting from the large number of providers in the retail market. Competition has also finally taken off in the electric heating sector. At present, several companies provide electric heating across Germany and the amount of customers switching to electric heating doubled in 2014. The electricity wholesale markets are marked by high liquidity. Electricity can now be traded on the exchange at shorter notice and shorter intervals. The market power of the largest electricity generating companies has decreased significantly over the last few years."

Jochen Homann, Bundesnetzagentur President, continued: "Electricity generation has been marked by a decrease in generation from conventional sources accompanied by an increase in renewable electricity generation. Network expansion is not able to keep pace just yet. As a consequence, the network operators had to take more steps in 2014 to safeguard network and system stability."

Measures to safeguard network and system stability are necessary when individual sections of a distribution or transmission network are overloaded and security of supply is threatened. Compared to 2013, intervention in generating schedules by the transmission system operators (TSOs) (known as redispatching) increased by 6% to a total of 8,453 hours.
The TSOs' forecast for net intervention costs in 2014 is €186.5m. The volume of energy generated from renewable sources but not fed into the grid (on account of feed-in management measures) almost tripled from 555 GWh in 2014 to 1,581 GWh in 2015. The amount of compensation paid increased by around 89% to some €83m.

The first quarter of 2015 has already seen another increase in such measures and hence the amount of compensation paid.

The Bundesnetzagentur President went on to comment on developments in the gas sector: "There has been a year-on-year increase in imports and exports. The major sources of gas imports remain Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States together with Norway and the Netherlands. The main recipients of Germany's exports were the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria and France."

The slight downward trend in gas retail prices has continued. An analysis of prices for household and industrial customers as of 1 April 2015 showed a decrease of around 0.1 ct/kWh compared to the previous year.

Kartellamt President Mundt continued: "The liquidity of the natural gas wholesale markets increased once more in 2014. There has been significant growth in bilateral wholesale trading, and on-exchange trading volumes have even more than doubled. Import prices are now mainly based on exchange prices for natural gas rather than oil prices as before. There is also competition at national level between the providers in the major retail markets."

The Monitoring Report 2015 has benefited from further improvements in market coverage and the validity of the data collected. The analysis of this data provides a comprehensive and detailed picture of market developments. The report is available for download on the Bundesnetzagentur and Bundeskartellamt websites (www.bundesnetzagentur.de/berichte).

Press release (pdf / 98 KB)