On June 1, 2021, a new electricity bill format came into force in Spain for domestic users that came with important changes in the price structure and above all with a new price discrimination system where they were distinguished three clearly differentiated billing periods throughout each day.
It was a change that came with the intention of helping us save on the bill at the end of the month and available to those users with Voluntary Price for the Small Consumer (PVPC) that had less than 15 KW contracted as their maximum power peak (most of Spanish households).
They were therefore fixed three time slots what they named as “point, plain and valley” and that they had a somewhat peculiar distribution distributed alternately at different times of the day, largely conditioning what we would pay at the end of the month in our homes.
Thus, the peak period it was during which the cost of tolls and charges would be highest, being between 10 am and 2 pm and 6 pm and 10 pm. The flat section It would have an intermediate cost and would be between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. and between 10 p.m. and midnight. Finally the valley rate was the cheapest and ran between midnight and 8 a.m. as well as during all hours on weekends and holidays.
Time slots are no longer useful
This system of time slots made clear at what times of the day using electricity at home was more expensive and cheaper, helping us consumers to make plans for turning on equipment and appliances with higher power consumption in those hours that are most suitable for us to minimize spending.
However, this time order in the price of light it has lasted little, since in recent weeks the clear differentiation between tranches with different prices has been clearly blurred in favor of a complex distribution incomprehensible for the average user and that ruins the plans that we could have made for our appliances.
If we had memorized which hours were cheaper, we had a “chop” stuck to the fridge with a magnet to know when to turn on the oven and the washing machine was cheaper or we simply had programmed the ignition of our devices consumption such as dishwashers, heaters, etc. from 00:00 or on weekends, all that is useless.
Although the explanation of this new change in rates not clear And there still does not seem to be official confirmation by the Government, according to sources from ABC and El Mundo, the differences seem to come from the measures taken by the Executive in mid-September 2021 to lower the bill. For this, a decree was promulgated in which the special electricity tax was lowered from 5.11% to 0.5% and until the end of the year electricity system charges were reduced by 90%.
These changes would have led to the fact that the price ranges set in June have now been totally blurred so that it is no longer clear what the cheapest hours will be to do the laundry, something for which we must go directly to the website of the Spanish Electricity Network where the price charts by hours and for each day of the week.
Prices without clear patterns of time slots
During the first three months of application of the time slots and until September 15, 2021, according to Red Eléctrica Española’s own website, the daily price graphs clearly showed different very marked sections with a structure of “castle battlements” where it was possible to see with relative ease which hours were more expensive and which ones were cheaper.
From that date, we can check how the difference blurs and we go from that concrete structure in “battlements” to a line with ups and downs that do not offer a clear pattern of schedules well differentiated. This situation even leads to sections where we previously had a cheaper price sometimes turn out to be the most expensive of the day, as we can clearly see in the attached graphs captured directly from the Red Eléctrica Española website.
In this way, during the last weeks those of us who waited for the arrival of certain hours to turn on some high-consumption appliances, instead of saving a few cents, we probably have not done it or even see how the expense will have increased on the next invoice.
How to know which times will be cheaper
As we have been commenting on in the article, the previous time bands that came into effect on June 1 present numerous changes, since they are modified every day and even every hour. They no longer serve to plan the hours of the day with less consumption.
What can we do to know when to put the washing machine? Well, the most reliable and immediate option is to go directly to the website of the Spanish Electricity Network and take a look at the graph where electricity price is displayed in euros per kilowatt for PVPC rates every hour of the day.
The graph shows the values for the Peninsula, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla and uses a color code of green, yellow and red on the X axis depending on whether the price exceeds a certain numerical value.
If we click with the mouse at any point on the graph, the cost at that specific time, which can help us assess how much it will cost us to turn on a specific appliance.
Will the time slots approved in June be operational again? Then it is not clear. We will have to wait for official confirmation from the Government to know if this happens again. At the moment, the best option to plan spending is through consult the Red Eléctrica Española website every day, since the distribution varies a lot from one day to another.
More information | Spanish Electric Network