Up to €890 instead of €30 for smart meters: VZBV acts against electricity firms

The German Federation of Consumer Organizations (vzbv) is taking action against electricity companies that charge high prices for the installation of a smart meter. A vzbv spokesperson told c't on Thursday that "several injunction proceedings have been initiated against metering point operators concerning the appropriateness of the charges demanded in the respective price sheets provided". The proceedings are at a very early stage, so concrete results are not yet available.

The background to the injunction proceedings is the so-called right to smart meters: Since January 1, consumers have been able to demand the installation of a networked electricity meter from their local electricity grid operator. According to Section 35 of the Metering Point Operation Act, operators may "charge an additional reasonable fee" for this. Reasonableness is "presumed" according to the law if the amount does not exceed EUR 30.

Many network operators actually only charge 30 euros for the installation of a smart meter at the customer's request. Examples include Rheinnetz and Stadtwerke München. Other grid operators, however, charge much more. The Eon subsidiary Avacon, for example, charges €848.10 for consumption of up to 3000 kWh/a. Bayernwerk, which also belongs to Eon, quotes the sum of 888.98 euros in its price sheet.

Holger Schneidewindt, lawyer and energy expert at the North Rhine-Westphalia consumer advice center, criticized Bayernwerk's prices on LinkedIn: "Hey Bayernwerk, E.ON Deutschland, do you want to punish prosumers who want dynamic tariffs, for example, and thus help to 'alleviate' the feed-in peaks? How do you justify this blatant deviation from the €30? Something is going wrong ..."

Grid operator argues with draft law and "calculations in the industry"

Some other network operators are charging around €100 for smart meter installation at the customer's request, arguing that the German government has now recognized that €30 is not appropriate. In fact, the German government is planning to increase the costs for voluntary installation from 30 euros to 100 euros, which has been criticized by consumer protection groups and providers of dynamic electricity tariffs. The corresponding bill is to be discussed in the Bundestag on Friday.

An email from a network operator, which is available to c't, states: "Since the assumption has already been refuted by the digitization report and the draft law and calculations in the industry have shown that the actual additional costs are higher, not only we as your metering point operator, but also many other metering point operators in Germany have set the one-off fee at €100 or a higher amount."

Federal Network Agency has changed its website

The Federal Network Agency, as the responsible supervisory authority, writes on the subject that metering point operators can also charge a higher fee than €30 "if the costs are actually higher", but they would have to justify this separately. According to Web Archive, the authority had recently formulated this passage differently: Operators were allowed to charge a fee "in the amount of no more than a one-off 30 euros", it said in the same place on January 18.

(cwo)