The components
A household price of 35 cents per kilowatt hour breaks down roughly as follows: about 11 cents procurement and sales, about 11 cents grid fees including metering, about 2.05 cents electricity tax, about 5.6 cents VAT, and the remainder from the concession levy plus the surcharges for cogeneration, offshore grid connection and interruptible loads.
Only the first block differs between suppliers. Everything else you pay regardless of whose customer you are.
What that means for switching
When a supplier charges 25 instead of 35 cents, it is not undercutting the total by 29 percent — it is undercutting its procurement component by far more. That works either through cheaper procurement, through a new-customer bonus funded from the marketing budget, or both.
This is why tariffs almost always rise after the first year. The bonus is one-off, and so usually are the procurement advantages. Always evaluate a tariff over two years — the tariff calculator on this site places both years side by side.
Grid fees are a matter of location
Grid fees vary considerably across Germany. They are highest in regions with a lot of renewable generation and little demand, lowest in dense urban areas. The gap can reach five cents per kilowatt hour.
You cannot influence this — short of moving. What you can influence is how much consumption carries the fee at all. That is precisely where self-consumption earns its value: it bypasses not only procurement but grid fees, taxes and levies entirely.
Standing charge or unit rate?
At 1,200 kilowatt hours a year, a standing charge five euros higher per month is equivalent to five cents per kilowatt hour. That is more than most unit rate differences between tariffs.
Rule of thumb: below 2,000 kilowatt hours the standing charge dominates; above 4,000 the unit rate does. In between you have to calculate — the crossover between two tariffs can be determined exactly, and that is what the calculator does.
Is switching really worth it?
Standing charge, unit rate and bonus netted out over two years.
Open calculatorAll results are model calculations based on your inputs and statistical reference data. They do not replace individual professional planning.