When they called for a tax on excess profits, the SPD and the Greens actually had the dealers in fossil fuels in mind - now profits from power generators who produce electricity using renewable energies are to be skimmed off in particular. In fact, they should be encouraged.
Because communication in politics is almost as important as the content, the SPD has previously given legislative projects euphonious names - such as the "Good Daycare Act". On Sunday, the traffic light government turned the "excess profit" from energy companies into a "chance profit" in order to defuse a coalition dispute. In 22 hours of negotiations, the leaders of the SPD, Greens and FDP found a regulation that turns a tax under discussion into a kind of levy - and, what is much more important, dramatically changes the circles of those who have to pay.
Actually, the SPD and the Greens had large international energy companies in mind when they called for excess profits to be taxed. This is important for the sense of justice, they argued. On the one hand, they referred to the unexpectedly high profits that some companies were making because of the sharp rise in gas and oil prices - and on the other hand to the high prices consumers have to pay. FDP leader and Finance Minister Christian Lindner, on the other hand, repeatedly referred to legal problems and the difficult demarcation of which companies should be taxed for those unexpected profits that economists refer to as "random profits" or "windfall profits".
Lindner's rejection was not only because the FDP has a general aversion to new and higher taxes. Economics Minister Robert Habeck from the Greens also referred to problems with implementation at the penultimate cabinet meeting in Meseberg. A system was now chosen in the relief package that starts at a completely different point - namely only with the power generators. Because the government points out that, for example, a power generator that generates wind power at a cost of, for example, 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour suddenly has income when the price of electricity shoots up.
The federal government now wants to skim off part of this money in order to be able to lower the electricity price for everyone. "The skimming of chance profits is only fair," said Habeck. Because energy companies that produce wind, solar, coal or nuclear power, for example, earn "an insane amount of money" according to the current mechanisms of the European electricity market. The idea of an excess profit tax was still aimed at producers and dealers in fossil fuels. However, most of these are located abroad. Now it is also about those companies or people who feed in wind or solar power.
Actually, the "merit order" principle when calculating electricity prices based on the price of the most expensive supplier was intended to favor exactly these producers of green electricity because they have the lowest production costs. The ulterior motive: Then more green electricity is produced because the profit margin is the greatest. However, the government is now arguing that this incentive system will be reduced to absurdity if the maximum price shoots up too much. In government circles it is argued that, at least in principle, nothing has changed: those who produce the cheapest products still have the greatest profit even when setting a price limit from which "accidental profits" are skimmed off.
