The traffic light coalition wants to finance an electricity price brake for citizens by skimming off profits from energy companies. “Accidental profits” at companies due to high energy prices would be skimmed off, said Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) on Sunday at the presentation of the federal government’s third relief package.
The Chancellor’s choice of words, which can also be found in the decision paper, is striking: instead of “over-winning”, the talk is now of “accidental gains”. In 22 hours of negotiation, the leaders of the SPD, Greens and FDP found a regulation that turns the discussed excess profit tax into a kind of levy – and dramatically changes the group of those who have to pay it.
The idea of an excess profit tax was still aimed at the producers and traders of fossil fuels, who benefit from the rise in oil and gas prices. However, most of these are located abroad. In the relief package decided on Sunday, a system was therefore chosen that only applies to the electricity producers – including the producers of green electricity.
The government points out that, for example, an electricity generator that generates wind power at a cost of, say, 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour suddenly has income when the price of electricity shoots up. The federal government wants to skim off some of this money so that it can then lower the electricity price for everyone.
“The skimming of chance profits is only fair,” said Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) on Sunday. Because energy companies that produce wind, solar, coal or nuclear power, for example, earn “an insane amount of money” according to the current mechanisms of the European electricity market.
Actually, the “merit order” principle when calculating electricity prices based on the price of the most expensive supplier was supposed to favor the producers of green electricity because they have the lowest production costs. The ulterior motive: Then more green electricity is produced because the profit margin is the greatest.
However, the government is now arguing that this incentive system will be reduced to absurdity if the maximum price shoots up too much. In government circles it is argued that nothing has changed, at least in principle: whoever produces the cheapest products still has the greatest profit even when setting a price limit from which “accidental profits” are skimmed off.
The federal government is initially relying on an agreement at European level, but the coalition partners are also prepared to “quickly implement” such a measure at national level alone, according to the decision paper. Payment methods from EEG funding should be used for processing.
On Sunday evening, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner promoted plans to skim off so-called random profits from electricity producers. “I am very much in favor of switching off the return autopilot on the electricity market (…),” said the FDP leader in an interview with ARD “Tagesthemen”. “Specifically, the point is that the producers of wind power, for example, are paid as if they had bought expensive gas. That has to be switched off.”
In ZDF’s “Heute-Journal”, Lindner emphasized that it was not about an excess profit tax. The SPD and Greens had called for such a tax for energy companies, but the FDP rejected it. “It’s about the price per kilowatt hour, it’s not about a company’s profit,” the finance minister explained the coalition plans on ARD. “An excess profit tax, on the other hand, would have introduced arbitrariness into our tax system. (…) And we want to generate income to relieve the burden, but we don’t want to provoke lawsuits against the state.”
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