What to expect from electricity and gas prices in 2025? innogy’s view – part II

Three years have passed since the collapse of Bohemia Energy, one of the largest electricity and gas suppliers. For hundreds of thousands of customers who opted for three-year fixed-price contracts at the time, a key decision-making moment is now approaching. At the same time, a considerable period has passed since the 2021 energy crisis, but the market still bears its after-effects. Adding to this is growing pressure on the regulated component of electricity prices due to the necessary investment in infrastructure, affecting costs for households and businesses.

The second part of our interview with David Konvalina, innogy’s retail director. 

Do you have specific recommendations for customers on how to secure a better electricity and gas price?

It is certainly worth keeping an eye on our offers. For several months now, we have been offering very generous financial bonuses for switching to innogy. Currently, an ordinary customer can receive CZK 12,000 from us when signing three-year contracts.
In terms of savings, we have prepared a comprehensive guide for the public, with advice and tips on saving energy, on the setrimenergii.cz website. It includes everything from simple, no-cost energy-saving measures to investments in insulation or a photovoltaic power plant.

We also recommend that customers monitor their consumption in our innosvět app or web portal. This can also save money, while ensuring that you are not surprised by an underpayment or overpayment in your annual bill, as you can adjust your advance payments whenever needed.

How are you preparing for possible future energy crises or supply disruptions?

During the recent energy crisis, we clearly demonstrated that we can secure sufficient volumes of energy for our customers, both existing and newly arriving ones. We confirmed that we can react very quickly and flexibly to market developments and, for example, adapt our product offering.

We also professionally handled the huge influxes of customers in need who switched to us at the beginning of the crisis and subsequently under the supplier-of-last-resort (DPI) regime.

How is your company preparing for the potential digitalisation of the energy sector, for example through the deployment of smart meters or involvement in smart grids?

It is true that the number of customers with interval metering will gradually increase as distributors carry out their planned meter replacements. For now, smart meters are mainly used by customers with photovoltaic installations. Greater penetration of smart meters will clearly enable customers to change their behaviour, improve the ability to forecast and plan consumption, and create new business opportunities.

For now, we are at the stage of identifying and analysing these potential opportunities. The digitalisation of the energy sector is an opportunity to offer new innovative products and services, but customers must be interested in them. At present, very few are.

Based on our experience with customers with photovoltaic installations, only a very small number of clients (around 5%) are willing to adjust their behaviour during the day, even though we enable this through our Dynamik product, where the price changes based on spot prices. Spot prices are known a day in advance, and it might seem trivial to do the laundry at noon, when prices are low, rather than at eight in the evening, but people simply do not want to change their habits.

How do you view the community energy trend? Do you plan to offer customers specific solutions in this area?

For now, there are around 10,000 customers across the Czech market who share electricity. The question is to what extent this number will grow. Essentially, those customers who have access to an energy source share electricity, typically photovoltaic generation. Personally, I think we are now at a stage where many people simply want to try it out. What will it mean if I send electricity to my mother, and what savings will she get from it?

We recently analysed this group of sharers internally. Their bills show that they shared an average of 27 kWh. Converted into monetary terms, that is around CZK 100.

I would also mention a crucial difference. Residents of an apartment building with shared photovoltaics do not pay distribution charges. But if I share electricity from my cottage to an apartment in Prague, I clearly have to pay the distribution charge, which is logical because I am using the electricity distribution network.

So we will see how the situation develops further. My personal view is that if I share electricity within one location and do not use the distribution network, it makes sense. Where use of the distribution network is involved, it is questionable.

Personally, I think it is suitable, for example, for municipalities. A municipality may have a nursery school with photovoltaics and share electricity with its care home. That means they will share it with themselves free of charge, and then it makes some sense.