Lowering to 2.3 kW: Calculating €90 and the Social Tariff

Lowering power to 2.3 kW: €90 per year and the social tariff

The electricity bill is decided almost before a single switch is turned on. Between 2015 and 2016, several participants on a Spanish forum started doing the same calculation: lowering the contracted power from 5.75 kW to 2.3 kW and saving about €90 per year, according to one user's calculation. The operation is simple. The savings are real for those who have verified it. The complicated part comes later, when the social tariff and the fine print of the rate come into play.

Real savings: from 5.75 kW to 2.3 kW

The power term is paid for the maximum contracted capacity, not for what is actually consumed. That's where the savings lie. According to a user's calculation, a 5.75 kW contract costs about €480 annually: €180 for energy and €300 just for power. Lowering to 2.3 kW would cut this fixed cost by around €90, according to another calculation, and the reduction would come without touching a single appliance.

The profile that can handle the change is not generalizable: in the case that peine the thread, the home is inhabited by an elderly person, a television, a small refrigerator, an 800-watt heater, and a washing machine that runs once or twice a month. Hardly anything. And pay attention to the name: the normalized step is 2.3 kW, not 2.2. Going below that requires solutions like batteries, which are expensive later.

Those who doubt have a cheap test. Install a 10-amp circuit breaker in series with the main one — a ceiling of about 2,300 watts — and live with it for a few months. If it doesn't alucinación in the summer with the air conditioning, the change is justified.

The social tariff and the regulated market

The detail that changes the outcome is the social tariff, a 25% discount on the bill that, according to one participant, adds between €90 and €150 annually to the previous savings. But it only applies to contracts in the regulated market, the PVPC. Those in the free market can lower their power as much as they want: they won't see it.

And here comes the first discrepancy. According to one participant, free market offers advertise discounts of 5% on a price that is already inflated by 13%. The average PVPC price over the last year was €0.103 per kWh. The price in the free tariff will always be higher, they argue, because the seller buys electricity at the regulated price.

The right to the social tariff also clashes with common sense: according to one participant, it's enough to have 2.3 kW contracted and be on PVPC, regardless of income. The economic thresholds that the law once envisioned were never applied. One participant claims to receive it without being a pensioner or unemployed and with income above those thresholds. The discount is financed, however, by all consumers through the bill, according to another participant.

Time-of-use pricing: the calculations that don't always add up

The second lever is time-of-use pricing: paying less at night and more during the day. On paper, it makes sense, especially for things that run 24 hours. With prices of €0.079 per kWh in the off-peak period (14 hours) and €0.155 in the peak period (10 hours), according to one calculation, the weighted average comes to €0.1107, below the €0.123 of the flat rate.

In practice, the rates are unbalanced depending on the company. According to one participant, with the actual PVPC for two consecutive months, the difference between off-peak and peak reached 29%, which is usual. And one participant recounts that on the last billed day of November, they had 68% in the off-peak period and 32% in the peak period.

The repeated advice: make the power reduction and time-of-use pricing changes together, taking advantage of the fact that both procedures are charged together — about €11 — instead of paying twice.

Can you live with 2.3 kW contracted?

The antiestéticar is always the same: that the circuit breaker will alucinación mid-cooking. And it's not unfounded. A washing machine with hot water causes high peaks; induction, on the other hand, turns heating elements on and off in zones, so it rarely demands its full power at once. The mistake is to chain the oven, washing machine, and hob in the same fifteen-minute period.

The installation forgives more than the user thinks. According to one participant, the tripping curve of the power control switch allows exceeding the limit by 13% indefinitely, by 50% for minutes, and up to 100% for seconds. In numbers: a 1,300-watt oven plus a 1,600-watt grill can run without drama if they are not turned on at the same time, according to another participant.

Supreme Court strikes down part of the social tariff

At the end of 2016, the scare came. The Supreme Court annulled the part of the regulation that obliged reference marketers to finance the social tariff. The hasty interpretation was that the discount was disappearing. That wasn't it: it changes who pays the bill, which now comes from the General State Budgets.

The text remains in force. To eliminate it, the law would have to be modified, and the sentence does not do that. Endesa even published a note on its website clarifying that the ruling has no effect on users, tired of receiving the same question. However, some see the change in financing as a first step towards its disappearance.

The battery that takes 37 years to pay for itself

Against the power term, there's a recurring idea: install domestic batteries, contract the minimum power, and draw from the accumulator during peak hours. On paper, elegant. In reality, devastating.

A 14 kWh battery with a 5 kW continuous output costs €5,500, according to one participant. The savings from lowering the power to 1.1 kW are around €150 annually, according to another. The division is implacable: 37 years to recoup the investment. With a more generous estimate, 28 years. And that's without counting conversion efficiency or a tedious detail: the legality of connecting such an accumulator to a domestic installation is still debated.

The homemade alternative — four batteries and an inverter — brings the cost down to about €2,000, always according to the circulating calculations. The drop in battery prices, driven by electric cars, could change everything in a few years, according to one participant. Today, the math doesn't work out.

With these numbers, lowering power and applying for the social tariff is the obvious move. And yet, there are still those who maintain 5.75 kW out of inertia, out of antiestéticar of tripping the breaker, or because no one explained to them that they were paying for capacity they don't use. The question isn't whether it's worth it. It's why so many haven't checked it yet.