Blackout: the electricity companies want to keep our compensation

Has your electricity company already paid you the 15, 20, 25 or 30 euros that correspond to you as compensation for last year's blackout? Me neither. No one. They haven't paid it to anyone.

They are breaking the law. A regulation that obliges them to pay in the first quarter of the year the compensations related to the supply cuts that occurred in the previous year. And last year we had a macro supply cut. That great blackout in April that left all citizens without electricity for many hours. The electricity returned in some areas earlier and in others later, but the number of hours that great supply cut lasted implies that the vast majority of consumers have the right to be paid that economic compensation established by the electricity sector regulation.

The problem, the problem as always, is that the companies have passed through the arch of triumph their legal obligation and that the body responsible for ensuring compliance with the law seems that it was doing something else.

We have had to file complaints before the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC) against the five electricity distributors operating in Spain. A complaint in which we do not ask that they be given a warning so that they finally pay us our money. No, no. We also ask that an economic sanction be imposed on them proportional to the dimensions of the fraud they are committing, because it is a fraud not to return amounts that, although per person they are a reduced amount, at a global level involve many millions of euros.

We hope that Competencia starts working to protect the interests of consumers given what we suffered in that blackout, because for now the only thing the CNMC has done is propose that consumers have to lose money, we have to pay part of the costs that blackout represented. We, the victims, those who have absolutely no responsibility for what happened, have to put money to assume in a shared way with the entire electricity sector the costs of the blackout. It makes no sense, and we have also conveyed this to Competencia in our allegations to the norm with which it intends for us to have to pay money while we wait for the companies to compensate us with what is due to us.

I am Rubén Sánchez and sometimes I see frauds.