Discounts that are too high, bad information or long queues on hotlines: This is what dissatisfied consumers criticize in relation to the energy price brake.
The Federal Association of Consumer Centers (VZBV) is pushing for improvements in practice when it comes to government energy price brakes. “The energy price brakes should relieve people unbureaucratically. In many cases the opposite has happened,” says the board member of the association, Ramona Pop, of the Funke media group.
A good half (53 percent) of dissatisfied customers complained that the energy suppliers were demanding discounts that were too high. Others are poorly informed or they “landed in hotline queues when they had questions,” adds Pop.
The consumer advice center launched an appeal at the end of February and asked what problems there were with the implementation of the relief packages for gas, electricity and heat. By June 1, she had received nearly 1,350 replies. Because only problems were asked about, the results say nothing about how many consumers are generally satisfied or dissatisfied with the price controls.
From March to June, almost 300 more people reported problems with the energy price brake to the so-called early warning network of the consumer advice center.
Consumer center boss Pop deduces from this that the federal government must “improve the law and formulate it more clearly so that the desired relief reaches all consumers”. With the electricity and gas price brake, the price for a large part of private household consumption is capped.
In the meantime, however, suppliers are again offering contracts with tariffs below the upper limits of the price brakes. These are 40 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity and 12 cents per kilowatt hour for gas.
Source: Stern
