Bureaucracy Delayed Savings of 10 Million Kuna on Cheaper Electricity

If electricity were to decrease by just five kuna, consumers would save ten million kuna monthly. However, it took HERA half a year for one amended article in the methodology for calculating electricity prices.

The lack of reduction in electricity prices, or the complete disregard of HEP’s request for a reduction, was explained by the Croatian Energy Regulatory Agency (HERA) as the absence of a Methodology for determining electricity prices, writes Novi list.

This is a document required under the new Electricity Act from February of this year. HERA only released the methodology for public discussion on August 2, and the nearly six-month delay was explained by the complexity of the document and the need to consider many factors in its preparation.

This explanation might hold if the mentioned document were not available on the pages of this state agency. It is an official document of four and a half pages, with a total of 13 articles, of which three pertain to pure bureaucracy, discussing the commencement of the document’s validity, the subject matter of the document, and the cessation of previous methodologies.

This indicates that HERA took almost six months to write ten articles explaining the methodology for determining electricity prices. However, most of the content is actually the same as in the previous Methodology, created in 2011, with the only significant difference arising in the article concerning the “unit price for balancing energy calculation.”

All of this shows that electricity consumers through HEP-Operator of the distribution system – which involves more than two million households in Croatia – do not have cheaper electricity precisely because of HERA, as it is hard to believe that it took almost half a year for one amended article in the Methodology for determining electricity prices.

Although this minimal price reduction may not seem significant, the mathematics show that it would represent an important financial input. For instance, if the price reduction were only five kuna per household (and projections indicate a larger reduction), citizens would save ten million kuna on a monthly basis.