The Treasury will enter this year more than 2,200 million for the ‘green dividend’ that it wants to cut to the electricity companies

The companies suffer collapses in the stock market and ask Ribera to use this money to reduce the electricity bill, which in May registered its highest level in 32 months.

The public accounts will receive this year a multimillion-dollar extra income due to the increase in the cost of _CO2 that is contributing to put the price of electricity in Spain through the roof and has become a serious threat to the economic recovery. This is one of the great paradoxes of the electricity sector: electricity becomes more expensive and hits the incomes of families and companies while the Treasury enters more for the collection of taxes such as VAT and for the auctions of _CO2 emission rights that Europe coordinates.

The “cost of polluting” has skyrocketed in recent months driven by the acceleration that European countries have given to the ecological transition and financial speculation with these rights. In figures, its price has gone from 19 to 52 euros per ton of _CO2 in a year.

These rights are allocated free of charge to the polluting sectors in an amount that is reduced year by year and, on the other hand, they are auctioned by Brussels, which then distributes the collection among the different member countries participating in the process. As rights are cut at a higher price than companies reduce their emissions, their price goes up. Spain corresponds to about 50 million tons, so taking into account the current price of CO₂ and the one marked by the futures between now and the end of the year, its revenues would exceed 2,200 million euros in the year as a whole, double what had been entering until now.

The electricity sector is asking the government to take advantage of this peak in revenue to help households and businesses finance the regulated costs of the electricity system and reduce the cost of the bill. The companies are thus responding to the new cut that the Vice President of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, wants to approve on the income of their nuclear and hydroelectric plants to try to make electricity cheaper. The Government’s argument is that these facilities are benefiting from a very high market price without having to bear the cost of _CO2 in their accounts as they are clean technologies from the point of view of emissions.

Ribera’s plan is to raise this mechanism through a draft law to the Council of Ministers this Tuesday and that is ready in the first half of 2022. Sources in the sector estimate the adjustment around 1,000 million euros with the current _CO2 prices, something that yesterday made the main electricity companies on the Stock Exchange tremble. Endesa, with a less diversified business and more focused on Spain, took the worst hit with a fall of 5.71% in just one day. Iberdrola and Acciona, the other two major victims, registered falls of 2.7%.

The measure was highly questioned by investors and analysts, to whom an intervention of this type in the electricity market takes them back to the times when regulatory swings were frequent in the sector. “Uncertainty”, in this sense, was one of the words that could be read most in some of his comments, both for having known the measure through the press and for his doubts that a mechanism of this type is endorsed by Europe. Ribera had until now shielded itself in European regulations to avoid touching the functioning of the wholesale electricity market.

Analysts and the utilities themselves also warned of the impact that this measure may have on the fulfillment of the ecological transition objectives committed by the Government to the European Commission. On the one hand, the _CO2 penalty sends a negative signal against two zero-emission technologies that should play a key role in supporting the deployment of renewables in the coming years. On the other hand, the funds that invest in the big electricity companies and the companies themselves are the same ones that are investing in the installation of the renewable energies that the country needs in its ‘green conversion’.

The sharp rise in _CO2 prices is one of the factors behind the sharp increase registered by the receipt in the month of May. The month closed yesterday at its highest since September 2018 and you would have to go back 10 years to find a spring in which the price of the kilowatt hour has been so expensive. Five months after starting 2021, an average user accumulates an invoice 22% higher than that of the same period of the previous year.

The sharp increase in the bill coincides with the entry into force this Tuesday of a new electricity bill system that threatens to further increase the level of ignorance of households about how their rate is structured and why it rises or falls at the end of the month. From this moment, the price of electricity will change markedly depending on the time of day it is consumed. It will be cheaper on weekends and much more expensive from Monday to Friday between 10:00 and 14:00 in the morning and 18:00 and 22:00 in the afternoon.

Source: El Mundo