Iberdrola says that it is "collecting" the information requested by the INE for the new calculation of the CPI

Iberdrola assures that it is "collecting" the information that the National Statistics Institute (INE) has requested for the new calculation of the consumer price index (CPI), which the body is going to change because it currently only takes into account customers covered by the semi-regulated rate, the voluntary price for small consumers (PVPC), the most affected by the sharp increases in receipts in recent months.

Electric company sources explain that “on April 24 they sent us a letter requesting additional information, which we are collecting. Given the complexity of the data, we have requested an extension of the term that has been granted to us in writing and we hope that the information will be available to the INE in the coming days”.

On Thursday, the first vice president of the Government and minister of Economic Affairs and for Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, asked companies for “responsibility”, especially energy companies, in the face of high inflation, so that they “put their shoulders to the wheel”, lower the price of electricity and provide the INE with the data that has been requested in order to put an end to the overweighting of the price of gas in the CPI so that it can faithfully reflect the price of electricity.

"We have spent months trying to get these detailed data" but "there is an electric company that has not provided the data and we need everyone to help," lamented Calviño, who did not identify that company. It is about Iberdrola, as El Confidencial advances this Friday.

“The message I am sending is to urge the energy companies to put their shoulders to the wheel so that the price of caburantes falls, so that the price of energy in the wholesale market falls and so that the CPI reflects real prices well,” Calviño stressed. Thursday.

"We send this information to the CNMC on a quarterly basis," Iberdrola sources point out, stressing that "electricity companies have been proposing the disaggregation of the CPI for more than two years, taking into account fixed-price contracts and not just the regulated rate."

This last rate modality is the one that has picked up the strong increases in the wholesale electricity market in recent months, because it is directly indexed to the so-called pool. Hours after Calviño's statements, the president of Iberdrola, Ignacio Sánchez Galán, He assured that the clients benefiting from this modality are “fools” and affirmed that they are the only ones who are paying more, despite the fact that the free market (traditionally more expensive than the PVPC) is already beginning to experience strong increases, according to Facua.

Being eligible for the PVPC rate, which has about 10 million low-voltage supplies, is an essential condition to benefit from the discounts of the social bonus for vulnerable households, which benefit about 2 million supplies.

Iberdrola, which has been charging against the design of the PVPC for months, is the company that has most openly opposed the cap on electricity generation with gas that Spain and Portugal have agreed to make electricity cheaper. According to Galán, the so-called Iberian exception is not justified because, he assures, Spain is not an energy island, despite the fact that the interconnection of the Peninsula with France does not reach 3%. The Spanish-Portuguese proposal has finally been sent by both countries to the European Commission this Thursday.

The INE has been working for months on changing the CPI measurement technology, which reached its peak last March (9.8%) and which is expected to will collect the effect of the so-called Iberian gas solution which is expected to be approved in the Council of Ministers next Tuesday.

Before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the statistical agency contemplated postponing until at least 2023 the change in the measurement of the price of electricity, which was initially expected to apply in January of this year. But he had to scrap that plan because, to avoid bias, "stability in the evolution of prices in the previous year and in the year of the introduction of the new source" is required, something that has made it impossible to set records for the pool of the last months.