Spain and Portugal are planning to present a joint proposal to the European Union (EU) to set the maximum price for electricity at 180 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) in the wholesale market.
This is one of the measures that the government headed by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (PSOE, Social Democrat) plans to implement in an attempt to alleviate the excessive price of energy prices.
Spain recorded an annual inflation rate of 7.6% in February, driven by the increase in prices of electricity, gas, fuel and fresh food.
The third vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, told the Onda Cero radio station that the governments of Spain and Portugal are preparing a joint proposal to their European colleagues to cap the price of the megawatt hour in the wholesale market to 180 euros.
The maximum price of 180 euros/Mwh was a reference that existed years ago in the Spanish and Portuguese regulation. But in 2019 a European Union directive prohibited limiting the offers of electricity companies in the wholesale market.
The minister said that at that time, just two years ago, this limit of 180 euros/MWh "seemed crazy that would never be reached", but today it has been widely exceeded.
For this reason, she believes that it is "little debatable that it should be the maximum limit that we must accept in our market."
€ 217.63 on Thursday
On Thursday, the average price of electricity in the wholesale market was 217.63 euros/MWh. Ten days ago, on March 7, it was 544.98 euros/MWh, with peaks of 700 euros MWh, due to the rise in the price of natural gas due to the impact of the war in Ukraine.
Minister Ribera said that the government will give a "national response" to decouple gas from the electricity market if the European Union's action is delayed.
In this sense, the Minister of the Presidency, Felix Bolanos, already announced on Wednesday that the Spanish government will approve a decree on 29 March that will lower the prices of electricity, gas and fuel. However, he did not specify what type of measures will be included in the decree.
