2014 electricity rise blocked
Saturday, December 21, 2013 @ 3:39 PM
This piece from todays El Pais holds out some hope for us all next year......
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said Friday that the government would soon be reviewing electricity rates after Spain’s anti-trust authority, the CNMC, invalidated the result of a wholesale auction that took place on Thursday and would have meant a huge hike in consumers’ bills.
“The government is working on a procedure to fix an alternative price to that of the auction,” Rajoy told a news conference. “The matter will be resolved before the end of the year.”
Rajoy reiterated that in no case would the result of the auction be applied to what Spanish consumers pay for their electricity. “The government believes the rise was excessive and unjustified,” he said. “The CNMC thinks the same and for that reason we have annulled it. The important thing is that the outcome of the auction is not passed on to bills.”
The Industry and Energy Ministry has to decide over the course of the next few hours whether to formally throw out the result of the wholesale auction on Thursday after the CNMC in the early hours of this morning informed the ministry that it could not “validate” it because of doubts about the reliability of its outcome. The CNMC does not have the powers to declare the tender null and void.
The price of electricity increased by over 25 percent at the tender, meaning that electric bills were set to rise by 10.5 percent next year. The government is also planning to raise the so-called regulated component of consumer bills – which covers the cost of transportation, distribution and rate premiums paid to renewable energy producers – by one to two percent. As a result, consumers, already struggling to make ends meet in an environment of falling wages and high unemployment, would have seen a hike in their electricity bills next year of between 11 and 13 percent. The wholesale component accounts for about 45 percent of the typical electricity bill and the remaining 55 percent the regulated component.
The Industry and Energy Ministry on Thursday formally requested that the CNMC launch an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the auction on the grounds that there may have been collusion among energy companies.
Source was today's El Pais