The average daily price of electricity in the wholesale market will again break records this Wednesday, shooting up to 228.59 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) euros compared to 203.68 on Tuesday and exceeding the 216 euros reached by the last Friday. In just six days in October there have been the three highest prices in the history of electricity. And with the prospect of continuing to rise due to high gas prices, which is what marks the marginal.
The highest price this Wednesday will be Tuesday between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., when it will reach 260 euros, also a historical level, and the lowest will be registered between 3 and 4 in the afternoon with 193.20, in the same record situation. This situation occurs in the midst of a rise in the price of all raw materials linked to energy around the world, such as gas, oil and coal, which at the same time triggers CO2 rights, also at record highs.
Faced with the rise in prices, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, pointed out on Tuesday the possibility that the European Union would study “decoupling” from the price of electricity that of natural gas to control the rise in energy prices. In Tallinn, the head of the Community Executive said that “in the short term we will speak in the European Council and in two weeks in a formal council, on how to approach storage (of energy), a strategic reserve and we will look at the global composition of the market of the electricity”.
Iberdrola again criticizes the Government
For his part, the president of Iberdrola, Ignacio Sánchez Galán, has warned this Tuesday in Bilbao that only with a stable and predictable regulatory framework for energy will his company’s investments continue. Galán has criticized the “terrifying interventionism” that is taking place in Spain in energy prices when the increase in the electricity bill is a problem worldwide derived from the continuous rise in the price of natural gas and insisted that it is not fault electricity or CO2. In this sense, Sánchez Galán has criticized that to combat this rise in prices “only” in Spain, measures have been taken that question the regulatory framework and that, therefore, Iberdrola is going to rethink, as it announced last week, all its investment policy in Spain.
In turn, Repsol Chairman Antonio Brufau warned that “the energy transition is going to have a cost” and pointed out that an example is what is currently happening with the price of electricity production. Brufau indicated that one of the factors that explains this increase is the high cost of CO2 emission rights and pointed out that this high cost is the result of a decision of the European Union that considers that it should be high to encourage companies to invest to reduce your emissions.
However, he warned that this perspective that rights prices will rise causes “speculators to appear” who decide to purchase a product that they know is going to rise. For this reason, according to Brufau, Europe makes “a mistake” since it allows these speculators to “position themselves long” and that it should be rectified by allowing it to give the signal that these rights may also trade down.