The Federal Chancellor, the Economics Minister, the Head of the Network Agency: Many have announced in recent weeks that gas will become significantly more expensive.

But consumers are only now beginning to feel what that means in concrete terms.

For example, the customers of the supplier Rheinenergie from Cologne.

This will increase the price per kilowatt hour of gas consumed from 7.87 cents to 18.30 cents on October 1st.

The company also calculates what that means in individual cases: In an apartment with an annual consumption of 10,000 kilowatt hours, the costs increased from 960 to 2002 euros.

In a smaller detached house with a consumption of 15,000 kilowatt hours, the costs increased from 1353 to 2918 euros.

According to industry circles, around 150,000 customers will be affected by the price increase.

The hotline is unfortunately overloaded,

The pressure on the federal government is growing

Julia Loehr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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Consumer portals can hardly keep up with entering the price increases announced by gas suppliers in their tables.

The Check24 portal, for example, has recorded seven densely printed pages and almost 540 price increases since March of this year.

For an average household - here 20,000 kilowatt hours are set for this - the annual costs have risen with the previous increases from an average of 1846 to 2816 euros, an increase of almost 53 percent.

It sounds similar at Verivox.

For August, September and October alone, basic gas suppliers announced 135 price increases by an average of 47 percent, writes the comparison portal.

The annual additional costs: around 892 euros.

The surcharge under the Energy Security Act, which the Federal Ministry of Economics plans to apply from the beginning of October, is not included in these increases.

Robert Habeck (Greens) put it at 1.5 to 5 cents per kilowatt hour last week.

The surcharge is intended to reimburse energy companies for 90 percent of the additional costs they incur because they have to procure replacement Russian gas on the world market.

The surcharge is also due in current contracts in which no price increase is otherwise possible.

The exact amount should be known by the end of August.

If it is actually 5 cents, the average household will have to pay up to 1,000 euros extra for gas per year.

The General Association of the Housing Industry recently estimated

Even if economists like Veronika Grimm warn that the price increases are important so that private consumers and companies save more gas than before: the more letters of price increases now end up in the mailboxes of customers, the greater the pressure on the federal government, the two relief packages - theirs They are valued at 30 billion euros - to push a third afterwards.

The increase in housing allowance announced by Olaf Scholz (SPD) and the introduction of a citizen's allowance instead of Hartz IV is not enough for many within the traffic light coalition.

"Trust is damaged"

Both Matthias Miersch, parliamentary group leader of the SPD, and Andreas Audretsch, in the same function with the Greens, call for the introduction of an "excess profit tax" for energy companies.

"It is deeply unfair when only gas customers have to answer for the rescue of Uniper, and at the same time large energy companies pay out billions to their shareholders," says Miersch.

Audretsch adds: “Those who benefit from the crisis must make a contribution to provide targeted financial support to people with little money.

If we don't do that, we are preparing the ground for their dangerous propaganda for those who understand Putin, conspiracy ideologues and right-wing extremists.” The FDP-led Ministry of Finance has so far rejected the introduction of such a tax.

The liberals want to create relief through higher income limits within the tax system,

the reduction of the so-called cold progression.

"As a result, citizens have a higher net wage, which specifically counteracts price increases," says deputy parliamentary group leader Christoph Meyer.

Criticism of the government's communication policy comes from the Union.

"Trust is damaged when a chancellor's word has a half-life of less than a week," says the parliamentary group's climate policy spokesman, Andreas Jung.

Scholz initially spoke of a gas levy of 2 cents per kilowatt hour, and Habeck said shortly afterwards that it could also be 5 cents.

Jung further criticizes: "It is an absolute absurdity that the federal government wants to add 19 percent VAT to the gas levy."