Mith the sale to the Spanish infrastructure investor Asterion, the municipal owners of the energy supplier Steag can now look forward to a “reconciliatory end”. That’s what they say themselves. The six municipal utilities in the Ruhr area cities of Dortmund, Duisburg, Bochum, Essen, Oberhausen and Dinslaken took over the coal-fired power plant for around 1.2 billion euros. At that time, the group was in trouble, it had been making losses for a long time and had to be restructured. This was not only expensive for the municipalities, but also painful – after all, it turned out that they are not the best owners for the business in the long term.
Since the decision in 2021 to sell Steag again, the energy crisis has made the business a whole new attraction for investors. This is reflected in the price: When it is sold, the company is now valued at 2.6 billion euros. How much money remains with the municipalities after deducting the liabilities still depends on the annual result. That is likely to be lavish, since Steag Power’s coal-fired power generation is benefiting from the soaring electricity prices and the continued operation of several power plants that were actually supposed to be taken off the grid but are now needed to ensure security of supply. Last fall, power plants in Saarland and the Ruhr area returned to the market. Steag Power, Germany’s fifth-largest energy supplier, currently operates hard coal-fired power plants at six locations and thus accounts for 5 percent of Germany’s total electricity generation.
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