The government approved a new financing model last year. electric social couponElectricity bill reduction program applied to vulnerable households after the Supreme Court abolished the previous mechanism. The new system put the cost of aid, currently more than 800 million a year, on all companies in the region. electricity sector without exception (traders, distributors, manufacturers…).
Electricity companies are returning to taxation and have already started a legal battle to cancel the new financing mechanism. For the time being, he has foiled the overthrow attempt undertaken by the Supreme Court. independent electricity and halted their plans to stop paying the portion of the total cost of the aid program that they had to bear.
This Association of Independent Energy Marketers (ACIE)bringing together fifteen companies that are not integrated into large vertical groups and Acciona, Cepsa, BP, Totalenergies or Fenie, Last October, she filed an appeal to try to overturn the latest legislative reform, as she found it discriminatory by charging about half of her electricity social bonus to the electricity sales sector.
The employers of small electricity companies also requested the Supreme Court to submit a preliminary ruling to the CJEU to determine whether the new financing model is in violation of community law and to raise a question of unconstitutionality to the Constitutional Court.
The Supreme Court directly decided not to accept ACIE’s appeal, deciding that the association does not have jurisdiction for the jurisdictional review it requests. The court criticizes the electrical employers’ attempts to create the “appearance” that they are going against the principles of a royal decree “the truth is that what is contested in this case is that the Supreme Court can review it because it has regulatory status”. appeal is a few rules of the two royal decree laws”, which the Supreme Court cannot annul because it has the force of law.
This State Attorney It also opposed the appeal and entered the process to challenge ACIE’s complaints about the alleged discriminatory treatment of trading companies in relation to the rest of the electricity sub-sectors in allocating the cost of relief measures to vulnerable households. . The state lawyer argued that this is not true if all the activities of the electricity sector are included in the distribution according to the weight of their total bills, and if the distribution between companies within each sub-sector is also made according to each invoice. There appears to be some discrimination.
The cost of social bonding
The electricity social bonus allows you to apply discounts on electricity bills of between 25% and 40%, depending on the degree of sensitivity of customers (currently, as part of anti-crisis measures, discounts have been temporarily increased to 65% and 80% on receipt).
Initially, the cost of this mechanism was borne only by the large electricity companies that had to market the regulated electricity tariff: Iberdrola, Endesa, Naturgy, EDP and Viesgo (These last two, Total Energies and Repsol with years). Successive financing system reforms in the wake of judicial riots are expanding the list of companies that have had to bear the cost of deductions for vulnerable households.
The current Government, in response to the requirements of the EU Supreme Court of Justice, and after the Supreme Court’s final annulment, approved a reform last year that collects the cost of the mechanism from all companies in the electricity sector without exception (marketers, distributors, manufacturers…).
As the weight is distributed according to each company’s market share, the bulk of the funding continues to fall to the large energy groups. The big electricity companies have insisted for years that the Government should bear the cost through the general State budget, because it is a social policy and that the companies should not be charged.