This Tuesday, 1 June, a new electricity bill model has entered into force with the goal of encouraging energy savings, efficiency and self-consumption.

In this way, consumers are encouraged to change their consumption habits to lower the traffic on the electrical grid during the peak daytime hours.

New fee structure

The most significant part of this new electricity bill is changes in how the 3 consumption time slots work for all users who have contracted less than 15 kW of power:

• Peak hours - High cost
  • 10 am - 2 pm
  • 6 - 10 pm
• Normal hours - Medium cost
  • 8 - 10 am
  • 2 - 6 pm
  • 10 pm - 12 midnight
• Low hours - Low cost
  • 12 midnight - 8 am
  • Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.

Therefore, from now on, electrical consumption will be cheaper at night and on weekends. And to achieve greater savings on your electricity bill, you should choose the low hours, when the costs are the lowest.

What should you do to be eligible for the new billing system?

There are two different cases depending on the type of user:

• For users who are eligible for the regulated fees of the Voluntary Price for Small Consumers (VPSC), the change is automatic.
• However, free market users, those who agreed to the price with the company, have to make sure that their supplier adapts the contract price to the new regulation.

How do the experts advise you to benefit from this change?

To save on your electricity bill and be more efficient, the experts advise programming your washing machine, dryer or dishwasher to operate at night. Or you can cook on the weekend and freeze the food to lower your oven or stove use during the week.

Therefore, users who can adapt their consumption habits to the new schedules will be able to save the most.

Possibility of contracting 2 power slots

As a new option, the new electricity bill offers the possibility of contracting 2 peak powers. Until now, users were only able to have a single peak power, but now they can request 2 different powers for specific time slots.

The goal of these changes is to lower consumption at peak hours to avoid overloading the grid, and this decreases the need to work on new infrastructures, which boosts costs that are ultimately reflected on end consumers’ bills. Users who manage to shift their energy consumption habits to normal and low hours will save the most on their bills.