It’s called Gasumlage, it’s a law that empowers German companies to offload the accumulated losses onto the shoulders of consumers. It is not something born between today and tomorrow, it is the result of a debate that has seen opposing fronts. The Bundestag faction Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, a parliamentary group of the Greens, has long campaigned for gas surcharges, arguing that bankruptcies are damaging to Germany’s entire gas supply.
The tax is Uniper
That’s a tax of around 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour. Uniper alone, the leading gas import group in Germany, reported losses of 12.2 billion euros in the first six months of the year. A red partly due to the intermittent disruptions of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, which traverses the Baltic Sea and carries Russian gas to western Europe via Germany. To this loss must be added a write-down of 2.7 billion announced by Uniper, which translates into more expensive bills of 500 to 600 euros per year for consumers as a result of this calculation.
Uniper is a public company listed in both Frankfurt and Milan, the main German gas importer and in July the German government took a 30% stake in Finnish energy company Fortum (which held 75% of the shares) to try to revitalize assets and saw also presented a loan of up to 9 billion euros, which was disbursed through bonds and interventions from the public bank KfW.
The political struggle
The Left Party, a movement uniting the left, has announced a fight, but the government is unlikely to reverse its steps. there gas surcharge it will come into force in the autumn, when temperatures call for higher gas but also energy use, in a scenario in which up to 60% increases in the price of gas, which is also used to generate electricity, are announced.
Consumer groups believe that this is a tax that can further weaken the German population and will end up making the poorer classes insolvent. A valid argument, but one that ignores two important things: first, there is a lack of guarantees that the tax can be retouched upwards if it is not enough to cover the energy giants’ losses, and, last but not least, no take-back policy is adopted taking citizens into account as Uniper is certain to return to closed positive balance sheets over the course of 2024. Meanwhile, the Russian gas monopoly Gazprom is announcing double-digit price hikes that will not only affect Germany, but even extend its radius of action to the whole of Europe, including Italy.