The savings effect that some electricity customers may have been looking forward to because the EEG levy would no longer apply on July 1 will quickly fizzle out.

On Tuesday, the supplier Süwag Energie AG announced that it would increase its electricity prices again in August – just a month after the kilowatt hour will cost 4.43 cents less due to the provisionally canceled levy.

The bottom line is that the new tariff would then be around 0.25 cents below the current one, announced Süwag board member Mike Schuler, who is responsible for sales.

Inga Janovic

Editor in the regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and responsible editor of the business magazine Metropol.

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What looks like a salami tactic obeys the guidelines of the federal government: It has instructed the energy suppliers to pass on the complete elimination of the surcharge to the customers.

At the same time, it has forbidden the calculation of price increases planned in the course of this tariff correction.

After all, the customers were informed about the two upcoming price jumps in just one letter, said Süwag board member Mike Schuler.

Süwag recently informed its shareholders about its last financial year.

Accordingly, the Eon subsidiary with 900,000 customers and 1,800 employees was able to generate a profit of EUR 53.2 million and will pay a dividend of EUR 1.10 per share.

In 2020, the bottom line was even a profit of 74.8 million euros, but there was a one-off sale that year.

If you calculate this out, the result for 2021 is higher than the previous year, assured Schuler's colleague Markus Coenen.

Above all, Süwag generated more electricity with the 16 hydroelectric power plants nationwide and was therefore also able to generate more sales, while the energy generated in wind farms remained below expectations due to the weather.

High demand for network capacities

On the expenditure side, Süwag is planning record investments totaling 600 million euros in maintaining and expanding its network infrastructure.

After 100 million euros last year, 200 million euros are to be spent on this;

the company also intends to hire a hundred new employees, primarily for network projects.

Part of the money will be invested in the network in the west of Frankfurt.

After a technical defect last October, Süwag needed several hours to be able to supply more than ten thousand households with electricity again.

Since then, the redundancies have been increased, explained Coenen.

When expanding its network capacities, the Süwag subsidiary Syna is primarily focusing on the data center sector, which is growing in Rhein-Main.

However, their demand is so high that there will be bottlenecks in the line capacities, at least in the near future, Coenen admitted.

For the time being, he is not worried about the amount of electricity required for the data centers.

It is fitting that Süwag itself is getting into the data center business, and wants to build one in a consortium with Noris Network and the DC Data Center Group in the Marxheim district of Hofheim.

Schuler announced that the building permit is expected for the end of 2023.