DÜSSELDORF (dpa-AFX) - The president of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Müller, has complained about too little competition in electricity and gas prices for household customers. In the comparison portals, he sees that there are significantly fewer offers compared to recent years, Müller said at an event of the Wirtschaftspublizistische Vereinigung in Düsseldorf on Monday evening. "There are municipal utilities that only focus on their supply area, they have withdrawn from the nationwide supply," he criticized. "It is important to discuss what we can do to ensure that more market players, more energy suppliers also make offers beyond their very own area nationwide and that I as a consumer have a choice here."

He doesn't have a magic formula, he said. "I'm just offering them a description of the problem." Many people have had a "humbling experience" with switching providers over the past 18 months, he said. In this context, he referred to numerous contract cancellations by energy discounters.

The question arises, he said, "Where are actually the competitive forces or the competitive actors who will ensure that we also eventually return to falling gas and electricity prices?" He said there is no longer any authority in Germany that takes on this role.

Price supervision and approval have been abolished for good reasons, he said, and the Federal Network Agency is not at all keen on taking on such a role. "But if no authority does that, and at the same time consumers may have learned in the last 18 months, the one who switches may be the one or the stupid one, then we have a situation that we don't have a reasonable competition model in the electricity and gas market at the moment." He said it was overdue to "discuss how we ensure that we get to a reasonable competitive pressure so that ultimately prices can also come down again at some point."/tob/DP/mis