2023-06-24 10:18:11
The National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) has decided to continue with the surveillance that exerts on the large companies in the natural gas sector and will maintain special control over the companies throughout the year.
In principle, the information file open to energy companies due to alleged obstacles to rate changes by their customers expired in May, but the agency has decided to extend it until 2024 and continue to demand information from companies every month, according to official sources from the supervisor. to EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA, from the Prensa Ibérica group.
The body opened an investigation last October and since then has supervised the customer service provided by the energy companies to make sure the fluidity in the massive transfer of users who jump to the regulated gas tariffs in search of the aid that the Government distributes to make them cheaper due to the energy crisis.
The million-dollar aid plan announced by the Government in October caused an avalanche of requests for contract changes towards regulated rates, called rates of last resort (TUR). In just six months, more than a million customers have changed their contract to have the regulated gas ratefrom the 1.58 million TUR users in September to the 2.66 million at the end of March.
The great traffic jam to change rates
In the first weeks, there were huge bottlenecks for the energy companies to manage these requests, causing extremely long waits and difficulties in concluding the contract. Competition then opened an information file to the four large companies obliged to offer these regulated rates (Naturgy, Iberdrola, Endesa and Totalenergies).
The agency began to request information that the four large gas companies have sent every month on the technical and staff resources used to attend to the flood of requests, the number of calls answered and those that have remained unanswered, waiting times and the number of discharges executed.
Information that companies will have to continue remitting monthly throughout the year. The CNMC technicians have been evaluating in recent weeks the possibility of simplifying and reducing the data requested from the large gas companies, but in the end they have decided to keep the content and format of the required information unchanged.
The CNMC found that the massive transfer of customers from the free market to the regulated gas rate continued during the first months of this year, with more than 550,000 contract changes in the first quarter alone. “Given the possibility that this transfer situation continues, it has been decided to maintain supervision over the operation of the contracting services of last-resort vendors, in order to guarantee that the problems and difficulties of contracting the TUR are not reproduced. detected during the last months of 2022”, say sources from the agency. “For all these reasons, the period for the information requested has been extended. This information must continue to be sent by the companies until December 2023 included”.
No penalties for companies
The information file is still open, but the CNMC ruled out taking the step of opening a sanction file against the large energy companies, as this newspaper already announced last February. The initiation of a disciplinary file would entail having found sufficient evidence that infractions had been committed and that would open the possibility of applying sanctions to the groups.
The information file is a first step in the supervision processes that the CNMC can carry out in the regulated sectors. In many cases it works as a notice to sailors with the aim of companies correcting their actions before initiating a disciplinary file. And in this case, the agency considers that it has worked and that the blockage problems detected in the first weeks were resolved relatively quickly.
Government aid to lower the natural gas bill to millions of homes has caused a shock and has broken the market. The subsidies and the reduction of taxes on the bill are serving to reduce the receipt of customers with regulated gas rates by 40% and have generated a historic commercial turnaround in recent months with one million customers changing their contract. However, they are still in the minority and less than a third of all customers have already opted for regulated rates (some 5.6 million users remain on free market rates).
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