The current balance is bitter: According to Jens Hamer from the Federal Audit Office, the network expansion is years behind plan: “That’s currently seven years and 6,000 kilometers. Three years ago it was 4,000 kilometers.”
Energy is given away and operators are compensated for losses
If a system is curtailed and is therefore unable to generate energy and bring it into the power grid, the operator receives compensation for the lost income from the feed-in tariff that he loses. Another aspect that makes electricity more expensive for consumers than it should be: If electricity is missing somewhere else in the network, expensive replacement electricity has to be purchased.
“The costs for this amounted to 3.1 billion euros last year. They have increased almost two and a half times since 2017, when they were 1.4 billion. The network operators’ forecasts even assume that there will be 6.5 billion euros in 2026 annually,” explains Jens Hamer from the Federal Audit Office to the MDR magazine Umschau. “In our opinion, this is of course clearly contributing to further rising costs and to an overall more expensive energy system.”