The heating hammer is coming – what politicians and suppliers have been warning about for months is now being quantified by the German Institute for Economic Research in the new “Heat Monitor” with concrete figures. It also shows a surprise for the Corona years.
In the first two Corona years, 2020 and 2021, households in Germany spent less money on heating energy despite increased home office work. The temperature-adjusted heating was also slightly less, as the new “Heat Monitor” from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) shows. For the study, heating cost bills from the energy service provider Ista from around 250,000 apartment buildings in Germany were evaluated. For this year, the DIW researchers predict a doubling of gas prices or more for consumers.
The DIW expects gas prices to increase from 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt hour in 2020 to around 12 cents per kilowatt hour or even more this year. The DIW expects this price for the coming winter months, as DIW economist Franziska Schütze told ntv.de. The basis for this calculation are the current prices of the basic suppliers, which are currently around 12 cents. In addition, the gas commission commissioned by the federal government proposed capping the gas price at 12 cents. The DIW expects that consumers will save on gas because of the high prices.
The rise in prices will hit low-income households the hardest. If the price increases to 12.5 cents per kilowatt hour, the share of heating costs in lower income groups would increase from 6.2 percent to 11.7 percent, the authors write. In September, the new customer tariffs at energy suppliers were even 21.75 cents per kilowatt hour outside of the basic supply. Recently, wholesale gas prices have at least fallen.
Despite well-stocked gas storage facilities, the Federal Network Agency believes that gas consumption in Germany needs to be reduced by 20 percent. The authority emphasized to ntv.de that the German gas supply could never come exclusively from the storage facilities in winter because the quantities stored are simply not sufficient for this. In addition to short-term relief, long-term investments are now increasingly necessary, such as energy-efficient building renovations and heating replacements, especially for renewable energies, according to the DIW.
In the past two years, too, there has been less heating. According to the analysis, the heating energy requirement in 2020, adjusted for temperature effects, fell by 0.7 percent compared to the previous year. In 2021 there was a further decrease of 1.5 percent to 128.7 kilowatt hours per square meter of heated living space. Gas, heating oil, district heating and electricity were considered. Thanks to energy prices that were still low at the time, spending on heating fell by 3.9 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year and by 0.7 percent in 2021. On average, households spent EUR 7.86 per square meter of heated living space.
The decline in heating energy requirements during the pandemic is surprising, Schütze told the dpa. “After all, people were more at home over both years due to home office, lockdowns and short-time work.” Thanks to renovations, buildings have become more energy-efficient, but the pace must increase in view of the climate targets. The researchers write that the slight savings in heating energy requirements in the past two years of the pandemic have not changed the fact that the building sector continues to emit too much carbon dioxide. In order to achieve the climate targets, Germany must save around five million tons of CO2 a year in the building sector, around four percent of the emissions in 2020.
“However, we are observing a reduction of just one percent in multi-family buildings in 2020.” Unadjusted for temperature influences, the heating balance in Germany recently looked bleak anyway: In this case, energy consumption rose by nine percent in 2021, also because of the relatively cold winter.
