The Congress debates this Thursday the decree law approved by the Government to limit the price of gas for electricity generation for a year after the European Commission endorsed on Wednesday the so-called Iberian exception.
The measure will mean that the Government caps the price of gas for electricity generation at 48.80 euros/MWh and thus lowers the price of electricity, which is established by an auction system based on the highest generation price.
Until now, this cost is marked by the price of gas, which allows the operation of combined cycle plants. They are the ones that immediately cover the demand when the rest of the sources, largely renewable, cannot do so. But the increase in the price of gas has been making the electricity bill more expensive and shooting up to double it for the final consumer, professional or domestic, in the last year.
The new cap will be applied from the electricity market auction next Tuesday, June 14, which will set the price for the following day. It will be valid for one year and the discount will not be stable.
In fact, those 48.80 euros will be the average price established for this period. To begin with and for the measure to become clear, the initial cap will be set at around 40 euros for six months and will increase from five to five euros per month for the other six. The reduction will be transferred immediately to the receipt of consumers who have the regulated rate, about ten million users.
Doing numbers, after the application of the average cap at 48.75 euros/MWh, the average price of the auctions would be around 130 euros/MWh, to which must be added the cost that the consumers themselves would have to pay as a compensation to the plants with capped prices: around 45 euros/MWh. Because although they will see their margin reduced by lowering the average price of the generation pool, the operators will be guaranteed the cost of the gas that exceeds the established cap.
This discount will have a total cost according to the estimates of the European Commission of 8,400 million euros, of which Spanish consumers and the State will have to assume 6,300 during this period to complete the compensation to the combined cycle generators. In short, despite the exceptional readjustment of the model, in force for two decades, part of what the consumer does not pay directly on his receipt must be assumed through fiscal measures.
The third vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, estimates that the measure will mean an immediate reduction for 37% of domestic consumers and 70% for industrial consumers, with a drop in the average price of electricity of 38 % in this first period.
According to the Government's calculations, reflected in the impact report that accompanies the decree law, the average reduction of the bill will be 15.3% for the domestic consumer and between 18% and 20% reduction for an industrial consumer .
