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ROME – Bills skyrocket, electricity and gas increases. With the end of the year comes the usual revision of energy rates for families and small businesses. And this is not good news: for gas the increase will be 4.5%, while for electricity it will be even higher, equal to 5.3%.
In reality, the increases could be read from a more optimistic perspective: the prospects for economic recovery, thanks to the start of the vaccination campaigns, have pushed up the prices of raw materials. Oil, as we have seen in recent weeks, is back around $ 50. In addition to natural gas prices, they returned to the levels of a year ago, driven by demand from China and Asian countries, the first to emerge from the Covid emergency.
However, the economic recovery is counterbalanced by the increase in rates for families, VAT numbers and small businesses, caused by the increase in raw materials. Arera, the authority that regulates the energy, networks and environment sectors, explains it in a note and is indicated by law to review electricity and gas rates every three months. In the last quarter of the year, the “single” price of energy at the national level increased by 15% compared to the previous year and is in line with the prices of the same period of 2019. For natural gas, an increase of 23 % in wholesale prices in the first quarter of 2021: that is reversed in the invoices, because the period considered for the quarterly review is exactly the one that goes from January 1 to March 30, 2021.
But how does all this impact the bills of families and small businesses? It depends on the period you take into consideration. In electricity, the typical family’s spending in the “mobile” year (between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021) will be around 488 euros, 10.2% less than the equivalent of 12 months of the year above, which corresponds to a saving of about 55 euros / year. In the same period, the typical household expenditure on the gas bill will be around 950 euros, with a variation of -8.8% compared to the equivalent 12 months of the previous year, which corresponds to a saving of about 91 euros / year.
The situation is different if we look at the last few months: the drop in bills that occurred in the harshest months of the blockade, when the partial stoppage of economic activities had caused a slowdown in energy demand, almost canceled. Specifically, in the second quarter of the year, when electricity bills fell by 18.3% and natural gas by 13.5%.
