Madrid (EFE).- Almost 9 out of 10 Spanish consumers have their electricity supply contracted with one of the four large energy companies -Iberdrola, Endesa, Naturgy and Repsol-, which consolidated their leadership in a 2022 marked by the price crisis with a combined share of 86.1% between the free and regulated market.
According to data prepared by EFE from the registry of the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) and extrapolating the contracts of each group over the total number of supply points per year -which in the last one exceeded 30 million-, the Quota of all of them broke upwards after a 2021 of falls in which it was around 83%.
By companies, the classification was led by Iberdrola, with almost 34.5% at the end of 2022, the largest in the series offered by the organization, which dates back to 2019, followed by Endesa, with 33%, Naturgy, with 14.3%, and Repsol, with 4.3%, this being the one that has grown the most in that time.
In total, the four power companies controlled some 26 million supply points, which leaves a 13.9% share to be distributed among the independent marketers, who have been lamenting this situation.
Iberdrola and Endesa stand out
According to the recently published provisional figures from the CNMC, the group chaired by Ignacio Sánchez Galán accounted for some 7.6 million supplies on the free market in the fourth quarter of last year, 12% more in year-on-year terms, and almost 2.8 million in regulated, 12.6% less.
Adding both businesses together, these levels helped Iberdrola close this turbulent year with a share higher than that of the three previous years, when it ranged between 33.4% in 2019 and 33.2% in 2021.
Behind was Endesa, with a share of 33% -above the 32.6% of 2021 although lower than the 34.2% of the last year prior to the coronavirus pandemic-, thanks to its more than 6.2 million supplies in the free market, 14.9% more, and 3.7 million in the regulated (PVPC rate), 15.1% less.
The drop in contracts with a regulated rate was not exclusive to the two main groups in the country in electricity sales, and it is that between 2020 and 2022 close to 1.8 million subscribers switched to the free market.
The last trigger has been the instability and the continuous rise in prices in the wholesale market or “pool”, linked to natural gas and to which the PVPC is referenced.
Repsol, the fastest growing
Naturgy appears further behind, whose share rose to 14.3% as of last December 31, due to the push in the free market, which grew by 24.6%, with some 2.6 million supply points, which which offset the 15% decline in the regulated.
Repsol, for its part, concentrated around 4.3% of the total free and regulated markets -where it also operates through Régsiti- after growing 24% in the former, in a year in which it closed the purchase of a portfolio of 25,000 electricity customers to Capital Energy.
With operations like that and its multi-energy commitment, the multinational has gone from 863,723 electricity customers in 2019 to some 1.3 million in 2022.
This week, Repsol announced the purchase of 50.01% – and therefore, the takeover – of the electricity supplier CHC Energía, the seventh largest in the country, which in the last year totaled 343,914 supply contracts, both to homes and small and medium-sized companies, especially in rural areas and small municipalities.
Had it occurred last year, Repsol would have broken the barrier of 1.6 million electricity customers, and the joint share of the big four would have risen to 87.3%.
Other marketers
TotalEnergies was also above one million customers, with 3.8% of the market, while Fenie Energía was, at the end of the last quarter of 2022, the sixth marketer, with 381,265, just ahead of CHC Energía.
Holaluz, Eni and Audax completed the “top 10”, far from the top positions, with 283,930, 205,725 and 156,568 contracts on the free market.
The CNMC also includes Factor Energía, Som Energía and Energía Colectiva, with an even smaller representation and some 345,000 customers together.
In recent months, the Association of Independent Energy Marketers (Acie), of which several of the companies with the lowest share are a part, has denounced that the liberalization begun in 2009 “is being dramatically reversed.”
In his view, they are losing “thousands of customers” to the dominant groups since the Government began to enact measures in September 2021 to mitigate the impact of the rise in natural gas prices in the retail gas and gas markets. electricity.
For Acie, the legislator wanted to ensure that the companies of vertically integrated groups paid the extraordinary benefits, or that the price of the electricity supplied to their customers was much lower than the market price, which has generated a situation to the detriment of the independent ones. , practically incapable of competing with the offers of the big ones.