Construction costs are currently skyrocketing

In our village, we have district heating. According to the price sheet for heat delivery, there is a price increase of a total of 5.44 cents net per kWh. These are
gas procurement surcharge + gas storage surcharge + balancing surcharge. The legislator says that all surcharges should cost a total of 3.048 cents net.
Calling the municipal utilities has brought nothing – no one has answered for 4 days. Is the price sheet correct or should I involve the antitrust authority?

Yesterday I spoke with a broker from a local bank – with them, it is such that construction loans no longer get approved if the borrower cannot prove that they could also manage an additional refinancing of 20% of the construction costs.
The subsistence allowances, for example, have been raised dramatically, so 70% - 80% of the previous buyer group currently drop out of the market.

Existing houses hardly sell at all at the moment – in his opinion, prices have not yet adjusted to the economic and interest rate levels – the process is apparently still ongoing. Until 4-5 months ago, properties were snatched out of his hand – condition and price almost didn’t matter. Now more and more negotiation takes place, if there are any interested parties at all. He said people have become very cautious.

You do not receive natural gas, but heat. More than 1 kWh of natural gas is used to deliver 1 kWh of heat. In the case of direct combustion and corresponding losses up to your transfer point, these amount to about 10-20%. The supplier will probably be allowed to charge you this additionally, depending on the wording of your heat supply contract. It usually states that charges or surcharges imposed by the legislator, which were unforeseeable at the time of contract conclusion, will be passed on to the customer at the cost incurred by the supplier.

However, your price increase is significantly more than the 10-20% surcharge – regardless of the fact that the surcharge will not be imposed after all.
I will try to explain why this can be so, because it is still important for you. The emissions price in your bill (the charge on CO2 emitted from the combustion of natural gas according to the BEHG – Federal Emissions Trading Act) is actually inflated in the same way as the gas surcharge.

Presumably, your heat network is not supplied by a pure natural gas boiler, but by a natural gas powered combined heat and power plant (CHP) with a natural gas peak load boiler.
The catch is now: For 1 kWh of heat arriving at your premises, the CHP plant uses about 2 kWh of natural gas because approximately 50% of the energy is converted into heat, 40% into electricity, and 10% is lost through the chimney.
There is NO clear legal regulation on how the BEHG surcharge (emissions price in your list) must be passed on to the end customer.
The AGFW, an umbrella organization for heat supply and combined heat and power, has issued recommendations which are not binding. In the course of introducing the BEHG surcharge, various institutions, mostly legal advisors/law firms, also issued recommendations for the most legally compliant way of passing on the surcharge to customers with CHP heat networks.
There are basically 3 options:

1. Pass on 100% attributed to the natural gas quantities used. Depending on efficiencies and the CHP share of total heat, this results in surcharges on the levy of 50-100%.

2. Pass on based on a CO2 emissions calculation according to the efficiency method for CHPs. This results in only a minor surcharge on the levy, which roughly leads to the same result as with pure natural gas boiler supply, i.e., a 10-20% surcharge.

3. Pass on based on a CO2 emissions calculation according to the "Finnish" method. This offers a lot of leeway for assumed efficiencies of theoretical reference plants. This leads to a surcharge between 10 and 100% – depending on assumptions in the calculation.

In your case, apparently method 1 or 3 was applied. In any case, you should have received a letter on this by the end of 2020, but I believe this was not mandatory either. I do not know the legal situation, but method 2 would be more favorable for you.

Finally: What does your post have to do with construction costs?

With prefabricated house manufacturers and developers, new orders have dropped by about 30%.

By the way, I am also receiving offers again by email from GUs where I inquired 2 years ago.