Since last Monday, April 1, between 2 and 5 p.m., the price of electricity in the wholesale market was negative for the first time in Spain, not a day has passed without the national electricity system having recorded prices of zero euros and, occasionally, of minus zero and some decimal. “This situation has been happening for some time in other countries in the European Union, but it had not yet reached Spain,” explains Cristina Corchero, technology director and founder of the startup Bamboo Energy.
Corchero affirms that with more or less frequency, zero and negative prices are here to stay. They are a consequence of multiple factors that can be summarized in a greater supply of electricity thanks to renewables and a lower demand. This was explained by the third vice president of the Government and Minister of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, in public statements in which she pointed out that electricity prices will continue to be low for some time, with “specific episodes” of negative prices. . In the minister’s opinion, supply and demand will rebalance “to the extent that other final uses of energy are being encouraged or at the moment in which storage capacity has definitively taken off, at a time of low prices. low because more is produced than is demanded, use that excess energy to accumulate it in some other way, in the form of hydrogen, batteries or water pumping.
While waiting for this to happen, the president of the Energy commission of the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises of Catalonia (Pimec), José Enrique Vázquez, warns of the risks of these low prices. “There is concern that investment in energy efficiency and energy self-consumption will stop,” says Vázquez, who is also president of the Grup de Gestors Energètics. Another fear of the expert is that large groups that invest in the construction of solar and wind parks will ask to be guaranteed a minimum remuneration price for the electricity generated.
It should be remembered that those who benefit from these low prices are only users whose electricity contracts are governed by wholesale market prices, that is, consumers covered by the Voluntary Price for Small Consumers (PVPC), known as the regulated tariff. Those who have fixed price contracts do not benefit in the short term, although they do benefit in the long term in case their marketing company adjusts the prices set downwards, as some companies are already doing. In any case, Vázquez remembers that the price for the electricity consumed is only a part of the total bill, which includes other concepts that do not depend on the price of electricity, such as the contracted power, the electricity tax, the rent. of the meter and VAT, which since April 1 is again 21%.
The other big beneficiaries are all those companies that have invested in making their demand more flexible. This is precisely the work of Bamboo Energy, which has created a solution capable of adjusting demand automatically based on market prices, as well as self-generation energy forecasts. Corchero adds that these solutions also benefit the entire electrical system, by helping to prevent, for example, there being more supply of electricity than demand and prices being zero or negative.
