MADRID, Oct. 5 (-) –
Feníe Energía has warned of the “worrying position of dominance of the electricity oligopoly” in the market and has warned of its consequences on consumers.
In a statement, the marketer supports the latest request made to the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) by the Association of Independent Energy Marketers (ACIE) asking for more transparency about the market shares occupied by large companies in the ” “electric oligopoly” and the distribution of contracted electricity within the sector.
This measure joins the claims already made by the marketer in recent months to promote free competition, “such as the urgency for the first auction of inframarginal energy provided for in the legislation and paralyzed sine die to be held as soon as possible.”
Thus, Feníe Energía emphasizes that the energy crisis has reinforced the dominant position of large vertically integrated companies in the last two years, and highlights that, in this context, the latest reform of the electricity market promoted by the Government to combat this crisis and Reducing the electricity bill “has also caused detrimental effects for end consumers, who are today more defenseless and divided into first-class and second-class customers.”
The CNMC has launched a public consultation to obtain greater supervision of energy purchase and sale operations carried out within the group by large vertically integrated electricity companies. The objective, among others, is to be able to control the conditions of advantage that these dominant companies may have over small energy marketers.
Furthermore, ACIE and marketing companies such as Feníe Energía have asked the body chaired by Cani Fernández to update the supplier change report in order to be able to x-ray the current distribution of contracted light within the sector.
In this regard, the marketer indicates that the latest report, published in July, provides data corresponding to the third quarter of 2022 with numbers “already worrying about the decline in free competition.”
According to the latest data from the CNMC, since the third quarter of 2021, the large oligopoly companies have increased their dominant position by five points “causing a situation of suffocation for the marketing companies that maintain free competition,” adds Feníe Energía. Thus, vertically integrated companies in large groups have gone from 75.4% free market share to 80.9%.
The general director of Feníe Energía, Paula Román, has regretted that “after many years of work, the last energy crisis has once again produced market concentration.”
‘FIRST’ AND ‘SECOND’ CONSUMERS.
Feníe Energía recalls that it has already denounced on repeated occasions that the coverage instruments of Royal Decree-Law 17/2021 are fully affecting Spanish consumers and that the effects of the current regulations are leading to the creation of “first-class” consumers. , with good energy prices, and “second-class”, with much higher prices.
In this regard, it is considered that the Royal Decree-Law was designed so that electricity generated without consuming gas would return extraordinary benefits and through such charges the electricity bill of all consumers would be lowered equally.
However, it estimates that the dominant companies sell more than 85% of the electricity they generate without consuming gas to their own marketers at a price lower than the wholesale market.
In this way, Feníe Energía considers that “they avoid such extraordinary benefits and allow their own marketers to allocate that cheap energy to attracting new clients, offering them very attractive offers at prices even below the wholesale market, while they offer their previous clients and to the market only expensive energy, from gas-based electricity generating plants”.
“The market has changed a lot and that is why we ask for inframarginal energy auctions, so that we continue to have an open market with free competition. Before, with stable and more equal prices between technologies, it was not so important to be vertically integrated. Now the generation that the large they had before market liberalization and the use they make of it, which does not participate in organized futures markets, puts independent trading companies at a clear disadvantage,” said Román.
