STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 6 March 2013

[xchrom]

24. Big Energy Battle: An Unlikely Effort to Buy Berlin's Grid

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/an-unlikely-effort-to-buy-the-berlin-power-grid-a-886426.html

Back in 2011, Arwen Colell was finishing up an undergraduate degree in political science and thinking about what to do next when her friend Luise Neumann-Cosel had an idea. They had met in a youth choir in Berlin and the friendship had blossomed through a shared passion for environmental issues. "She called me up and said, 'We should buy the grid,'" Colell said in a phone interview. Colell didn't have to think long before responding: "Sounds like a good idea."

Neumann-Cosel was referring to Berlin's energy grid, up for sale next year. Consisting of some 35,000 kilometers of underground cable, 8,000 medium- to low-voltage substations and 80 high-voltage substations that feed electricity to 2.3 million customers, the grid is a heavily-regulated monopoly that is available for purchase as a concession every 20 years. Depending on who you ask, it is worth somewhere between €1 billion and €3.1 billion.
In anticipation of the auction in 2014, the two founded a group called BürgerEnergie (People's Energy), which has raised €3 million in its drive to take the grid from Vattenfall, the Swedish company that currently owns the concession. It's an impressive amount of money for such a small initiative, but a far cry from what they would need to make a serious bid.

BürgerEnergie isn't the only group targeting the sale, though. A second citizen's group, called Berliner Energietisch (Berlin Energy Table), has undertaken a drive to re-communalize the grid. Their plan is to gather enough signatures to put the issue onto the ballot in hopes of forcing the city-state of Berlin to buy back the grid with public funds. There are also six other bidders, including Vattenfall. But these two citizen-based groups have created an unusual movement by politicizing something most people take for granted.