In the long term, the Ministry of Economic Affairs is also relying on a second mechanism: so-called Power Purchase Agreements, PPAs, for industry are to be promoted. PPAs are contracts that a power producer concludes directly with an industrial buyer. As a rule, they contain the promise that the producer will deliver the quantity X at a price Y, usually even from Plant Z, such as an offshore wind farm. Habeck now wants to secure such contracts with guarantees. It’s also a good idea, but it can’t be implemented in the short term.
Also read: “Our international customers buy more from the competition in Asia”
Basically, you can therefore safely forget everything that was in the three previous paragraphs for the time being. Because the crucial point of Habeck’s initiative is on page 4 of his working paper: In order to bridge the “intermediate phase” to 2030, namely with an “intact basic industry and new future-oriented companies”, a “bridging electricity price” of 6 cents for the kilowatt hour for one “Clearly defined group of recipients” needed, which, here it comes, had to be financed “from public funds”. According to EU statistics, the price in Germany recently averaged over 19 cents, in practice it should be somewhere between 8 and 15 cents for energy-intensive companies, but electricity can be had for less than 5 cents in the USA.