One in Three Copenhagen Restaurants Caught Stealing Electricity, Grid Operator Finds

• Radius inspected 50–60 restaurants in Greater Copenhagen and found meter fraud at every third premises
• The bypasses were discovered through routine control visits, not tip-offs, suggesting the true scale may be larger
• Honest restaurant owners face a competitive disadvantage as electricity thieves operate with artificially lower costs
• Losses from stolen electricity are socialised across all grid customers through higher distribution charges

Grid operator Radius inspected 50 to 60 restaurants and eateries across Greater Copenhagen and found that roughly one in three had rigged their electrical installations to bypass the meter, Berlingske reports. The fraud was uncovered not through tip-offs or whistleblowers but through routine control visits — a detail that suggests the actual prevalence could be higher, since only a fraction of the capital's thousands of food establishments have been checked.

The method is crude but effective: wiring part of the premises' electrical load so it draws power before the meter, meaning consumption goes unrecorded and unbilled. For a restaurant running commercial ovens, refrigeration units, ventilation, and lighting around the clock, the savings are substantial. Danish electricity prices — among the highest in Europe, driven by taxes and grid charges — make the incentive correspondingly large. A mid-sized restaurant can easily consume electricity worth hundreds of thousands of kroner per year. Shaving a third or more off that bill changes the economics of the entire operation.

The competitive distortion is the immediate problem. Restaurants that pay their full electricity costs are competing against neighbours who do not. Margins in the hospitality sector are already thin; an operator stealing power can undercut on price, absorb higher rent, or simply pocket the difference. Legitimate owners have no way of knowing whether the café across the street is cheating — and no recourse if it is. The playing field tilts silently.

The broader cost falls on every electricity customer connected to the Radius grid. Distribution charges are calculated to cover the cost of maintaining and operating the network. When power is consumed but not metered, the shortfall is spread across all paying customers. In effect, households and honest businesses in Greater Copenhagen have been subsidising restaurant fraud — for how long, nobody yet knows.

Radius has not disclosed the estimated total revenue loss or confirmed whether the cases have been referred to police. Danish law treats electricity theft as a criminal offence, punishable by fines or imprisonment. Whether prosecutors will pursue cases at this scale — dozens of establishments, potentially more — is an open question. The inspections covered only a narrow slice of the Copenhagen restaurant market. If the one-in-three ratio holds across the full sector, the aggregate theft runs into the millions.

The discovery also raises a question that Radius and Denmark's other grid operators have been slow to answer: why routine inspections of commercial customers were not conducted sooner. Restaurants are among the most electricity-intensive small businesses, and the technique of bypassing a meter is neither new nor sophisticated. That a third of a random sample was cheating suggests the practice had time to become normalised — a cost of doing business that everyone in the trade knew about and nobody reported.

Denmark's restaurant sector employs roughly 60,000 people. The ones paying their electricity bills are now waiting to see whether the ones who weren't will face anything more than a corrected invoice.

Sources: Berlingske