The arrival of cold and snow brings bad news for the pockets of millions of homes and businesses in Spain. The price of electricity is skyrocketing and will rise tomorrow above 94 euros per megawatt hour, the second highest record in the statistical series.
The increase in the price of electricity coincides with the collapse of the generation through cheaper renewable energy and a sharp increase in demand due to the drop in temperatures. In the absence of sun and wind to supply this peak in consumption, the electricity system has to burn its gas and coal reserves, with higher prices.
The rising cost of electricity will be suffered by those who have contracted a rate indexed to the daily wholesale market, which works as if it were a Stock Exchange and sets different prices for each hour of the day. Tomorrow, for example, the highest price will be recorded at 20:00, when the cost per megawatt hour will exceed 114 euros.
A one-off increase in the cost of electricity does not have a devastating effect on families’ monthly bills. The problem comes when this occurs in a sustained way over time, chaining several days with price records as high as that of this Thursday or that of tomorrow Friday.
For example, the average price of a kilowatt paid this Thursday, January 7 by a domestic consumer in Spain is 15 cents. The same day last year it was 10 cents. Taking into account that an average family usually needs around 10 kilowatts per day, the difference in prices at the end of the day would be around 50 cents.
The higher the consumption, the bigger the blow to the bill, so experts recommend postponing the highest energy use as much as possible to the hours when the price is cheapest. These are normally the first thing in the morning or during the early hours of the morning.
The consumer organization Facua has denounced that, with the data from the first seven days of 2021, the electricity bill of the average user would be 80.71 euros, 19.3% more than 67.67 euros from the same dates last year. The electricity demand for this Thursday is 752,000 MWh, according to data from Red Eléctrica the Spain (REE), operator of the system, and the maximum that has been registered is 41,334 MWh at 1:00 p.m. 40 hours. If compared with the business day before this Thursday, January 7, on Tuesday, January 5, the maximum demand registered today is 10.6% higher than that day and compared to Monday, January 4 it is 8.1% higher.
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