The energy company ENBW is surprisingly open to skimming off profits.

According to Chief Financial Officer Thomas Kusterer, the federal government's current considerations are "fundamentally understandable" if only the income from the unusually high electricity prices were skimmed off.

It is a "question of social solidarity," said Kusterer in a conference call with journalists.

Gustave parts

Business correspondent in Stuttgart.

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The listed group, which is almost entirely in public hands, is thus distancing itself from other companies in the industry and also changing the tone of its previous position.

"Interventions in proven market-based systems should be avoided," said RWE CFO Michael Müller on Thursday.

In October, ENBW board member Georg Stamatelopoulos was only critical of a possible skimming off of profits in an interview with the FAZ.

Kusterer said it was important to find a solution that noticeably relieved private households and industry when it came to energy prices.

It is understandable that the profits resulting from the high electricity prices should be skimmed off for the financing.

"The confidence of the citizens in the justice and ability of politics to act" must not be shaken.

It depends on the design

However, the manager also warned that design matters.

What is skimmed off is not available for investment.

This could have negative consequences for wind and solar parks, the progress of the energy transition and investor confidence in Germany as a business location.

The plans for the design have moved in the right direction in the past few weeks, Kusterer said in the conference call.

ENBW is affected in many ways by the current energy crisis.

The Leipzig gas importer VNG is one of the largest in Germany after Uniper and a subsidiary of ENBW.

In the meantime, VNG had gotten into difficulties, but has now been largely stabilized with state aid, even if there are still open issues.

ENBW also operates one of the remaining three nuclear power plants and now has to postpone the dismantling due to the stretching operation.

At the same time, the group, which is owned almost half by the state of Baden-Württemberg and half by local authorities, benefits from the high electricity prices as an energy producer with wind farms and solar energy.

Renewable energies help ENBW

However, the group has now lowered its forecast for the year as a whole, as ENBW announced on Friday.

The utility still expects an operating result of 2.7 to 2.9 billion euros instead of more than 3 billion so far.

The group announced that the costs of maintaining security of supply would probably increase in the fourth quarter.

In addition, it has still not been fully clarified how VNG's losses would be compensated and what the profit skimming would look like.

So far, the effects in the various business areas have balanced each other out.

Adjusted earnings in the first nine months of the year, at just under EUR 2 billion, were only slightly below the previous year's figure.

However, adjusted net income almost halved compared to the previous year to just under 400 million euros.

Due to the turbulence on the energy market and the high prices, the group's sales rose rapidly and increased to almost 40 billion from January to September.

That means more than doubling compared to the same period last year, when the group had sales of almost 19 billion.

The business with renewable energies had a particularly positive impact.

Adjusted earnings there increased by a good half to 840 million euros.

According to ENBW, this was mainly due to new solar parks, higher prices and better wind conditions.