The current situation
To be honest, our electricity bill isn’t that eye-watering. It’s dead easy to change supplier in Spain, as I suspect it is in most of Europe. A local distribution company maintains the infrastructure that brings power to the house, but you can buy that electricity from any number of retailers. How they pay each other is no concern of mine. Since we arrived, we’ve usually bought our electricity from a firm called Iberdrola. We’ve had lots of different plans with them – a fixed rate for every hour, three separate tariffs at different times of day, others with high- and low-cost periods, and so on. Again, I suspect this sounds similar to anywhere else on the continent. Iberdrola is an electricity producer. It owns nuclear power plants, hydroelectric stations, and wind and solar farms, among other things. There aren’t actually that many power generators in Spain. Once electricity is generated, it can be sold on the wholesale market, directly to large users, or through one of the two domest...