The Alliance for the Competitiveness of the Spanish Industry that brings together the main Spanish industrial employers –ANFAC (automotive), AOP (refine), ASPAPER (paper), FEIQUE (chemistry and pharmacy), FIAB (Alimentation and drinks), OFFICEMEN (cement) and UNESID (iron and steel industry)– has called on the Government to “immediately” adopt measures to reduce light and gas, given the persistence of high prices for both supplies. The industry complains that the price differential with other countries puts its competitiveness at risk and, therefore, proposes a package with short, medium and long-term measures to avoid a pernicious effect of prices on its activity.
In the most immediate area, the association calls on the Executive to start up as soon as possible the so-called ‘inframarginal auction’, this is a bid in which the great electrics they would have to offer electricity at affordable prices for large industrial consumers and for other independent marketers. The Government introduced this auction within its package of measures to deal with the impact of basic supplies in the industry that it announced last September and, although it set the first of these auctions for before the end of 2021, it has not yet been has held none of these contests.
In addition, the Alliance for the Competitiveness of the Spanish Industry also requires the Government to enable mechanisms to coverage of risks and guarantees of electricity contracts, in line with what was already contemplated in the Spanish Reserve Fund for Electro-intensive Entities Guarantees (FERGEI), something that the Executive assessed in the autumn but that finally did not get started. Also add the call for aid to electro-intensive consumers, as well as the urgent evolution of the Electrointensive Consumer Statute, incorporating policies as the compensation of 80% of tolls transmission of the electrical system.
This urgency extends to the publication of the call for aid for the compensation of indirect CO2 costs from 2022, the reduction of the rates applied in Spain to the minimum special tax on hydrocarbons, as well as use the registered surplus of its collection in 2021 in the reduction of tolls and gas fees by 2022. Industrial employers go beyond the national level by urging Europe increase the volume of emission rights in the market to favor the drop in prices of the right, at historical maximums, as well as to limit the participation of operators in this market.
In the medium term, this Alliance proposes the development of a Gasintensive Consumer Statute, with measures to support gas-intensive industries, as well as the participation of industrial consumers in the different electricity markets and capacity mechanisms. They also demand, within the exercise of transparency promoted by the Executive when requesting additional information from the electricity companies, the publication of the offers of the technologies in the market, without revealing the individual offers of the producers, in addition to the already known marriage price.
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On the other hand, they consider that a line of permanent incentives —without repercussion in regulated costs— to promote the investment in generation and storage facilities for self-consumptionspecifically oriented to industrial companies, and facilitate the access to the nodes of the electricity transmission and distribution network of industrial electricity generation projects in the self-consumption mode with sale of surpluses.
In the field of taxationestimate “necessary” eliminate “definitively” the 7% Tax on the Production Value of Electric Energy (IVPEE) and extend to at least the whole of 2022 the reduction of the Special Electricity Tax up to 0.5%. Within this extensive package of proposals, the Alliance for the Competitiveness of Spanish Industry also reiterates its opposition to adoption of National Fund for the Sustainability of the Electric System “in its present terms”. “Its impact would also increase with the entry into force of the new European guidelines for State aid in matters of climate, energy and the environment, since their application would very likely make it impossible to compensate the costs associated with the FNSSE foreseen in the bill. This is not the time to launch it,” they assure.