His new district heating bill has German firefighter and YouTuber “Der Sievi” turning red. Suddenly he had to pay 1.6 million euros.
Rising energy prices don’t stop at district heating, but the letter that Timo Sievert from Norderstedt (Schleswig-Holstein) near Hamburg found in his mailbox a few days ago left him as pale as a leaf. For 2023, the municipal utilities have estimated an unbelievable €1,647,620.33 in energy costs for your newly occupied single-family home with 150 square meters of living space!
For Sievert, who as “Germany’s loudest firefighter” regularly vents his anger at authorities, football and other abuses in strong words on YouTube, this shock demand was a direct model: “Do city utilities have someone on clarinet? “, exploded “O Sievi” in a video.
“Warm up to level 5000”
“I’m not kidding, it’s in black and white.” In the role of the utility company, an annual consumption of 9,840,000 kWh is actually calculated. For such consumption, he would have to heat an industrial hall with hundreds of thousands of square meters all year round “at the 5,000 level”, he chafed.
Read more: New electricity and gas price increases from January 1st
The energy supplier also kindly pointed out in the paper that Sievert could save around 590,400 kilowatt-hours of energy with just a “small sacrifice of thermal comfort”. This would not only reduce your bill by 98,000 euros, but also increase “security of supply in Germany”.
In Sievert’s next speech about the obvious mistake, the municipal utilities got their share of the fat. “Do you only have trained monkeys that press colored buttons? […] If a 90-year-old grandmother picks it up, she falls off the sofa dead,” scolds the camera. Video of her ends with her considering taking the letter seriously and asking for a pay raise or applying for welfare: “Hey, honestly, Stadtwerke Norderstedt, you can do this better, you can do this much, much better!”
Factor 1,000
In the end, a phone call to the municipal utility finally fixed the problem. According to “Hamburger Abendblatt”, a company spokesman spoke of a punctual “system error”. The on-grid district heating meter measures consumption in megawatt hours, but this is communicated to customers in kilowatt hours. When converting by this factor of 1,000, there was an error – the result was an absurd amount in the millions.
Nav Account rcp Time04.12.2022, 19:36| Act: 04.12.2022, 19:36