Barcelona Energía, the public electricity company launched by Ada Colau, can be considered the story of a failure. The company, owned by the Barcelona City Council, barely reaches 3,000 clients in its two and a half years of life. The marketer has not achieved the support of even a considerable part of the voters of Barcelona en Comú (156,157 votes), the party that proposed its creation to reduce electricity prices.
The reasons for this situation are not to be found in politics but in the economy and they seem obvious. The offers offered by the municipal company are not among the most attractive in the liberalized market, as can be seen in the comparison made by the CNMC for a typical customer. At the moment, the best prices for a consumer in the liberalized market in Barcelona are held by Iberdrola and Endesa.
Interestingly, the marketer that does appear on the list with an attractive offer is Eléctrica de Cádiz, the alliance between the City Council, led by José María González Santos, “Kichi”, which has 55% of the capital together with Endesa, which owns the rest. . That is to say, the public electricity company of Kichi competes with that of Colau and also improves its price.
Barcelona Energía closed in 2019, according to its accounts, with 1,500 customers and in 2020, according to some sources, it would have barely managed to incorporate a thousand more customers, which leaves the rate of acquisition at less than three customers a day and the figure is It is very far from the goal of 20,000 clients that the company managed when it was born.
According to the 2019 accounts presented by Barcelona Energia, the company recorded a profit of 5.6 million compared to 2.3 million the previous year, largely due to the rest of the company’s activities, which would support the statements of Colau that the company is not for profit.
The mayor Ada Colau has sent a letter this week to the president of Endesa, as well as to the vice president and minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, and the minister of the Generalitat, Ramón Tremosa, to protest the cuts that have been suffered in various areas of the city during the cold snap.
The response of Ribera and Endesa is unknown, but Tremosa asks for Colau’s collaboration to acquire the energy competencies to avoid these situations.
Barcelona en Comú included in its electoral program the intention of consolidating Barcelona Energia as the public electricity company of reference in Barcelona and its metropolitan area, but for the time being this is a very distant goal, beyond the management of municipal electricity consumption contracts that the mayor assures that they have served to save the municipal coffers 1.3 million euros over the years.
The cheapest energy prices can still be found for domestic customers at the PVPC regulated rate, despite this current moment of prices, offered by the large electricity companies. However, close to 17 million consumers opt for a rate in the free market for the different offers or products linked to them. This type of rate does not suffer the fluctuations of the wholesale market directly, although it does suffer indirectly, so these days the prices paid by its customers are not affected and are transferred in contract renewals. On the other hand, these clients do not benefit from the drops like those registered last year.
PSOE-Podemos clash
and both parties have ended up forgetting some of the main promises they made when they were in opposition and that they even included in their government program.
Podemos released a video last week in which it demanded the nationalization of Endesa to have a public electricity company. The purple formation assumed, however, that it did not have enough weight in the Government to impose it on its partner, so its claim barely served as a message to the gallery in the middle of the Catalan elections since, in fact, this aspect is not part of of the coalition agreement.
For this reason, the formation of Pablo Iglesias has insisted that the government program be fulfilled while hiding behind the fact that there has not been enough time in the first year of the legislature to make these changes.
In its electoral program, the purple formation promised to create a public electricity company to lower the electricity bill. “This company will play an active role in the installation of renewable energies, will push towards the transformation of the electricity market and will make it possible for us to meet the objectives set. Given the importance of these goals, it will also be in charge of implementing a lower electricity bill and guarantee that no one suffers from energy poverty. At the same time, it will work in coordination with the municipal public companies that have been created or that may be created for the marketing and management of their own energy”.
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