Brussels reckons that Spain has the highest costs for transporting and distributing electricity in the EU, in a new study due to be released in the next few weeks. They reckon its down to lack of competition and inefficiency in the market. Well….. duh!.
This leads on from my story a while back about how Spanish electricity costs almost a third more than British.
The EU study looks at the cost of transporting electricity over the national grid, and the cost of distributing it to the end user.
The distribution has an average cost of about 6 cents a Kwh – The UK or Bulgaria, the cheapest in the EU, have a cost of just 0,5 cents a Kwh.
And transporting the stuff over the national grid costs a further 1 and a bit cents a Kwh. This isn’t too bad, there are eleven EU countries with a higher cost than this.
But this means that to get a Kwh of electricity from the generator to my laptops costs a little over 7 euro cents in Spain. In the UK it’s under four euro cents.
But the electricity companies, and the government,reckon the EU has cocked up the figures.
See, the official cost is about 2 cents a Kwh, meaning that by the official figures Spain is the cheapest in the EU. The state publishes the cost annually and it costs the national about 5 billion euros a year.
The electricity companies say that the EU has obviously made a mistake, and is probably including the costs of renewable energy in the transportation costs, as well as costs of transporting electricity across different regions of Spain.
Hmmm… who do you believe? The fat cat electricity companies who run Spain, or the independent EU analysts?