DÜSSELDORF (dpa-AFX) - The Federal Network Agency has complained about too little competition in electricity and gas prices for household customers. On comparison portals, there are significantly fewer offers compared to previous years, said authority president Klaus Müller 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 "There are municipal utilities that only focus on their supply area, they have withdrawn from the nationwide supply," he criticized.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 does not have a patent remedy. He only described the problem. Many people have had a "modest experience" with a change of provider in the past year and a half, he said. In this context, he referred to numerous contract terminations 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 network agency is not at all "keen" on taking on such a task. "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 make sure that we get to a reasonable competitive pressure so that ultimately prices can also come down again at some point."

Ingbert Liebing, CEO of the VKU association of municipal utilities, disagreed: "We don't have a structural competition problem, but are experiencing the consequences of extreme market development due to Russia's war of aggression - competition per se has not gone away," Liebing told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Less competition, he said, is primarily also the result of a "drying up" of over-the-counter trading, where the majority of the energy industry is active. So far, there has been no government support for this sector - in contrast to exchange trading, which the German government supports with a financing instrument for security services.

Due to the strong price fluctuations, the interim financing expenses and, in particular, the required security deposits increased for the municipal utilities. "All of this ties up an enormous amount of liquidity, which is why many municipal utilities are focusing on their core business: providing long-term secure supplies to their existing customers." The federal government could itself boost competition if it stabilized not only the exchange with its major players, but also over-the-counter futures trading through a protective shield./tob/DP/ngu