Subscription to SPIEGEL Costs More Than Feed-in Tariff Surcharges

September 10th, 2013 by Guest Contributor

This article originally published at the Lenz Blog
by Karl-Friedrich Lenz

A short follow-up to yesterday’s post discussing the latest round of anti-renewable propaganda from SPIEGEL magazine.

That whole article whines about the cost of electricity in Germany, calling it a “luxury good”.

So I thought it might be fun to compare the cost of the feed-in tariff surcharges to the cost of subscribing to the SPIEGEL magazine for one year.

This page at SPIEGEL says that a subscription costs EUR 208 a year.

In contrast, the surcharge for 2013 is set at 5.227 cents.

The average electricity consumption for a German household is 3473 kWh right now.

That gives us EUR 181.53 a year in average surcharge costs right now, which is still less than the SPIEGEL subscription.

In contrast to a SPIEGEL subscription, German citizens actually get something useful for their surcharges.

And in contrast to a SPIEGEL subscription, German electricity consumers can reduce their costs. A SPIEGEL reader can’t say that he wants to read everything except the articles by Alexander Neubacher, and get a price reduction in exchange.

In contrast, any electricity user can buy a LED lamp and reduce their electricity use.

And if you are worried about costs, there are actually a lot of rather attractive tariffs available for anyone who looks. This page gives a hint (I have plugged in a random Munich address). You can buy electricity at 17 cents a kWh from the cheapest provider.

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Tags: Electricity, feed-in tariff, SPIEGEL, surcharge

About the Author

Guest Contributor is many, many people. We publish a number of guest posts from experts in a large variety of fields. This is our contributor account for those special people. :D

anderlan

“A SPIEGEL reader can’t say that he wants to read everything except the articles by Alexander Neubacher, and get a price reduction in exchange.”

Perfect! Sums it up. Free market, more players, more competition, more efficient, individual empowerment. There is no downside except to the incumbents…who apparently have the ears of Neubacher and maybe Spiegel.