COMPLIANCE · GERMANY
Company size ≠
energy obligation
Germany is rewriting the test that decides who must audit their energy.
It is moving from what kind of company you are to how many kilowatt-hours you
consume — and plenty of firms that sat outside the old test sit inside the new one.
OVERVIEW
The test is changing from who you are to how much you use
Under the existing energy-services law, the audit obligation turned on company classification — broadly, whether you counted as an SME. It was a question your finance team could answer from the balance sheet.
The reform replaces that with a consumption test measured across the whole company: every site, every energy carrier — electricity, process gas, heat, fleet fuel — added together against a threshold in gigawatt-hours. That is a metering question, not an accounting one, and most companies have never had to answer it in that form. On top of it sits the full EU stack, which applies here unchanged.
3 REGIMES
In force now
Carrying legal weight today for covered plants.
EDL-G energy audits
Energiedienstleistungsgesetz · company level · four-yearly
Mandatory energy audits to DIN EN 16247-1 for non-SME companies, on a four-year cycle, supervised by BAFA.
Mandatory energy audits to DIN EN 16247-1 for non-SME companies, on a four-year cycle, supervised by BAFA.
WHO
Companies that do not qualify as SMEs under the current classification test — the criterion the reform is set to replace.
WHAT TO DO
A full audit of energy use across sites, processes and transport, carried out by an auditor registered with BAFA, repeated every four years. Registration has been mandatory since November 2019; there is no statutory language requirement on the auditor.
Where it goes wrong. The audit is bought as a certificate. BAFA runs spot-checks, and a thin audit — narrow sampling, no measured data, generic measures — gets rejected. The four-year clock does not stop while you fix it, and the same report is usually the only energy evidence the company holds when a customer or a bank asks for something better.
EnEfG — Energy Efficiency Act
Energieeffizienzgesetz 2023 · company and site level
Management-system duties above consumption thresholds, plus a duty to identify, avoid and report recoverable waste heat.
Management-system duties above consumption thresholds, plus a duty to identify, avoid and report recoverable waste heat.
WHAT
Companies above the stated annual consumption thresholds must operate an energy or environmental management system, and must identify recoverable waste heat, avoid it where technically possible, and report the remaining potential to the federal platform.
ALSO
Separate efficiency and heat-reuse duties apply to data centres.
Where it goes wrong. Waste heat gets reported as an estimate, because almost nobody meters it. That estimate is now a published figure sitting next to an energy audit produced by different people from different assumptions. When the two are read together — by a customer, an auditor, or a heat-network developer — they do not agree, and the company cannot say which one is right.
BEHG — national fuel emissions trading
nEHS · upstream, on the fuel supplier
Germany's national carbon price on heating and transport fuels, charged upstream to fuel suppliers and passed through in what you pay at the meter and the pump.
Germany's national carbon price on heating and transport fuels, charged upstream to fuel suppliers and passed through in what you pay at the meter and the pump.
WHO PAYS
Formally the fuel supplier. In practice the cost arrives in your gas and fuel invoices — you are exposed to it without being a regulated party.
WHAT NEXT
The national scheme is set to give way to the EU’s ETS2 for the same fuels. See Coming below.
Where it goes wrong. The carbon component is embedded in the energy invoice and nobody separates it. Companies cannot tell how much of their energy bill is now a carbon price, which means they cannot build a business case for abatement against it — and they discover the exposure only when the price steps up.
1 REGIMES
In the window
Where the decisions being made now determine tomorrow’s liability.
EnEfG / EDL-G reform
Cabinet draft · not yet law · consumption-based trigger
The reform that replaces the company-size test with an energy-consumption test, and resets who must audit, who must run a certified management system, and who is free of both.
The reform that replaces the company-size test with an energy-consumption test, and resets who must audit, who must run a certified management system, and who is free of both.
STATUS
Cabinet draft, pending the Bundestag. A planned effective date has been indicated but the text is not law and can still change. Nothing on this card is an obligation today.
THE SHIFT
Obligation would turn on total annual energy consumption across the whole company, not on SME classification. Two thresholds are in play: a lower one that brings a company into the audit duty, and a higher one that requires a certified ISO 50001 or EMAS management system rather than a periodic audit.
WATCH
Thresholds, the transition period for companies newly caught, and whether existing audit cycles carry over. All three are still moving.
Why this is the card to act on. The consumption test counts every site and every energy carrier — electricity, process gas, heat, fleet fuel. Companies that assume they are under the line have usually only added electricity. Working out where you actually sit takes weeks of data gathering, and the only good time to do it is before the threshold becomes binding, not after.
2 REGIMES
Upcoming
Direction is set. The lead time is the preparation window.
ETS2 — buildings and road transport
EU instrument, landing on German fuel
A second EU emissions-trading system extending carbon pricing to the fuels used to heat buildings and run road transport — taking over from the national scheme.
A second EU emissions-trading system extending carbon pricing to the fuels used to heat buildings and run road transport — taking over from the national scheme.
EFFECTS
Energy cost and carbon cost converge for a much broader set of operators — offices, warehouses, vehicle fleets — making energy and emissions data a commercial input rather than only a compliance one.
FOR GERMANY
It replaces the national fuel scheme with an EU market price, which behaves differently: the number is set by the market, not by a national corridor.
Also on our radar
Germany carries the full EU stack on top of everything above — EU ETS for installations, CBAM on imports, CSRD for groups still in scope, the EU Taxonomy. Those are set in Brussels, not Berlin, and we track them on the European Union page. The Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz also reaches suppliers with environmental due-diligence questions, which land on the same emissions data even though the law is not an energy law.
Two rulebooks, one measurement
Berlin sets the audit duty and the management-system duty. Brussels sets the carbon price, the border charge and the disclosure standard. They are written by different people to different logics — but they ask you the same underlying question: how much energy do you use, where, and what carbon does it carry?
Answer that once, to a standard a BAFA-registered auditor and an EU verifier both accept, and the German duties and the European ones are served from the same record. The reform is not a reason to build a second system. It is a reason to build the first one properly.
HOW WE WORK ON THIS
We build the record,
then file from it
Ventrovia works the measurement layer first, because everything above it —
the filing, the verification, the trade — is only as good as the number underneath.
Establish where you sit
Total company consumption across every site and every energy carrier, then a full site audit to DIN EN 16247 — so you know whether the threshold catches you before it becomes binding.
File from one source
Audit evidence, waste-heat reporting and the data an ISO 50001 system needs, drawn from the same record — and the same record again for EU-level disclosure.
Move the number
Which measures pay back against a rising fuel carbon price, where recoverable waste heat is actually worth recovering, and what abatement costs per tonne.
CHECK YOUR STATUS
Would the new threshold catch you?
Add up consumption across sites and carriers, and see where you would fall under the draft test — audit duty, management system, or neither.
THE LAYER ABOVE
European Union
CBAM, the EU ETS, CSRD and the Taxonomy apply here unchanged. See what Brussels asks on top of the German duties.
