Czech households face one of the highest electricity prices in the EU, even though the Czech Republic is one of its biggest exporters. According to Eurostat data, only households in Denmark, Belgium and Ireland had higher electricity invoices in the second half of last year. But these are generally richer countries than the Czech Republic, with a higher price level, but also higher wages.
Among economically better comparable countries, the Czech Republic leads the way in terms of electricity prices. Last year, Czech households paid 9,130 crowns per megawatt hour. Slovaks paid 4,470 crowns for the same amount of electricity last year, Poles 3,810 crowns and Hungarians only 2,570 crowns. The average price of electricity in the countries of the Visegrad Group is 4,995 crowns.
The relatively high electricity prices for Czech households are all the more paradoxical because The Czech Republic is one of the largest net exporters of electricity in Europe, and even in the world. This means that few other countries export so much more electricity than they import, as the Czech Republic does. For example, in the first half of last year, the Czech Republic exported five million megawatt-hours of electricity more than it imported, thereby occupying the fourth place in the list of the largest net exporters of the EU (see here).
Connection to Germany
The Czech situation within the Visegrad Four countries contrasts particularly with the situation in Hungary, which in the first half of last year was the third largest net importer of electricity in the EU. It imported 6.2 million megawatt hours of electricity more than it exported. Nevertheless, its households paid approximately 3.5 times less for electricity than Czech households. Within the Visegrad Four, Slovakia is also a net importer of electricity, whose households also pay dramatically less for electricity than those in the Czech Republic.
The high price of electricity in the Czech Republic, even with its considerable net export to other countries, is to a large extent due to the close connection of the Czech electricity market to the German one. Meanwhile, Germany shut down its last nuclear power plants last weekend after more than 60 years of nuclear power generation. To creates further pressure on electricity prices for households in the Czech Republic, precisely because of the relatively close connection of the Czech Republic to the German energy market.
Energy prices for customers will decrease even more, experts say. But they will not drop to the level of 2020
Money
Energy prices for end customers will probably continue to fall during this year. And this despite the fact that the situation on the energy exchange has stabilized and wholesale prices will not change much. However, energy prices will not return to the level of the period before the energy crisis. This is also why people will continue to save on consumption. The representatives of the branch association and suppliers agreed on this.
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The Germans have decided to turn off their last nuclear sources, despite the fact that a number of other countries, on the contrary, are returning to nuclear power due to the effects of the war in Ukraine. Even Germany is in danger of not having enough sources of green electricity in the future due to the shutdown of the last nuclear power plants and the disconnection from Russian gas supplies – for example wind or solar – and will therefore have to either produce electricity from dirty coal and/or import it from abroad, including the neighboring Czech Republic.
At the same time, from an energy point of view, the Czech Republic represents the “seventeenth federal state of Germany”. It is highly integrated into the German energy market. If the Germans have to import electricity, it means that they do not have enough of it themselves, which, due to the interconnectedness of the markets, will put pressure on the rise of electricity exchange prices in the Czech Republic as well. The price of electricity for Czech households and companies then depends on these stock exchange prices.
The disconnection of German nuclear power plants must therefore really be seen as a step that will potentially put pressure on electricity prices for people in the Czech Republic as well.
Against the stream
It is symbolic that the newest nuclear power plant on the old continent, Finland’s Olkiluoto-3, started regular production this Monday. France plans to build six large reactors and a larger number of small modular reactors. Britain also has similar ambitions. And even Japan, after the ten-year nuclear paralysis that a nation with a historically bad experience with nuclear energy went through after the fatal accident at the Fukushima plant.
Germany thus goes largely against the trend of the times. And the Czech Republic, in its own way, with him.
In addition, Germany’s decision this year to definitively end the operation of nuclear power plants in the country may cause the death of approximately 16 thousand people who could have otherwise lived, a study by Columbia University calculates (see here). The reason for these deaths will be diseases and health complications related to higher carbon dioxide emissions. These will occur as Germany largely replaces nuclear-generated electricity with coal-fired electricity.
2023-04-23 12:55:00
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