Congress agrees to process the fund to remove renewables from the electricity rate

The Government has found support in Congress this Monday to continue with the processing of the fund to remove the cost of the oldest renewable energies from the electricity tariff and try to lower the bill.

In the midst of the energy price crisis in Europe, and pending the package of new measures to be approved by the Council of Ministers on Tuesday to try to contain the spectacular escalation of the wholesale electricity market in recent weeks, the Chamber has rejected the amendments to the whole presented by Vox and the BNG to the bill to create the future National Fund for the Sustainability of the Electricity System (FNSSE).

The FNSSE, one of the structural measures that the Ministry for the Ecological Transition has proposed to try to lower the electricity bill, will continue to be processed in Congress, but the text presented does not have the support of the PP.

His deputy Juan Diego Requena has asked the Executive to "be sensible" and "park the fund" because, he has assured, it goes "against rural Spain", the thesis on which the BNG based its total rejection of the bill. . Although he has acknowledged that "the bill may lower something", the popular deputy has claimed that this instrument be financed with the budgets. With the chosen scheme, "it will affect all consumers and not all large energy companies," he assured.

In a harsh debate, marked by references to the continuous daily records of the so-called electricity pool, the PNV spokespersons and Ciudadanos have advanced that they would not support the amendments to the whole presented to the FNSSE, "due to responsibility" and because "Spaniards need solutions ", said the orange spokeswoman, Carmen Martínez Granados. Idoia Sagastizabal (PNV) has warned that for the current price situation, derived from the record prices of gas and CO2, "there are no magic solutions", in line with the thesis of the third vice president, Teresa Ribera.

To request her support for the bill, the third vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition has indicated that this instrument "redistributes the effort" of decarbonization among the entire energy sector, assigning its contribution according to the volume of energy that each marketer sells. .

Ribera has argued that similar mechanisms have been put in place in other countries, such as Germany, which has created a supplementary tax on CO2 to finance support for renewables. He has invited the groups "to work constructively and in solidarity" in the current situation of the energy markets, and has defended that this fund "provides an effective solution to lower the cost of the bill", "economically viable and socially fair", to contain an escalation before which "we all feel concern".

According to the Executive's calculations, the future fund, once fully operational (it is planned to roll it out over five years), would facilitate a reduction in consumer bills of around 12% by freeing the electricity system from the cost of premiums to renewables, about 7,000 million euros per year, charging it to the energy sector as a whole.

Together with the bill to cut excess profits from nuclear and hydroelectric plants due to CO2, which is also in the pipeline, it will mean a reduction of 15% in the final receipt.

This, pending the shock plan that the Council of Ministers plans to approve this Tuesday to fulfill Pedro Sánchez's promise that at the end of the year a domestic consumer will pay the same as in 2018, discounting inflation. For now, the price of a megawatt hour (MWh) in the wholesale market has been rampant for weeks and since Friday it has been above 150 euros, an unprecedented level so far in Spain, in a context of high uncertainty in Europe regarding the winter due to the price shock experienced by the natural gas market.