The exorbitant price of gas, the mother of all battles

This year the information snake did not stop neither in the summer nor in the persistent drought. The reptile is winter and two-headed: on the one hand, the Covid, and on the other, the high energy prices worldwide.
In Spain the focus is currently on electricity, but this is false, a maneuver to mislead: the mother of all battles is gas, with its stratospheric price. It is the exorbitant price of gas that pulls the electricity bill, chemical production and even the production of bricks.

Various geostrategic and logistical factors (gas from Russia, Ukraine, the Morocco-Algeria tension, the transport of liquefied gas, Germany's total disaffection with coal and nuclear energy, the increase in demand from Australia and China, etc.) have made the gas market "irrational", which has also led to an increase in the price of electricity on the wholesale market, from which, fortunately, most consumers are protected.
In spite of this, the media is daily pounding on the price of electricity as if they were Christmas Lottery numbers. This is done with such insistence that citizens can become alarmed, confusing the overlapping wholesale market with the wholesale market where people go every day to buy a quarter and a half of a megawatt. Fortunately, this is not the case.
 
It is striking how, despite the media's insistence, Spanish consumers do not know in 60 percent of cases what type of contract they have contracted with their supplier, according to data from the National Commission of the Competition Market. The media trembling will not be so serious. There are those who claim that their bill has gone down. Many of them.
However, the worst has not yet arrived. In Spain we are enjoying the beginning of winter with mild temperatures. When the cold weather sets in and the gas boilers open the tap, our pockets will be shivering.

The price of gas has increased almost 11-fold.

Gas closed April last year at 17.6 euros megawatt hours; in October this year, at 180 euros MWH.
The price of gas makes us captive not only to our pockets, but also to the commitment to the decarbonization of the planet in which all countries are converging, some more quickly than others depending on their economic situation.
In Spain, which is a flagship in energy transition and in multimillionaire investment in renewables in its different presentations, the data is still worrying. This September the raw material for electricity generation was combined cycle and cogeneration plants, according to data from Red Eléctrica Española, almost 40 percent.

Today we are hostages of gas, but many large cities in the world have already signed a commitment to phase out gas and fossil fuels. The year 2050 is the benchmark for definitive abandonment. The dirty cloak that covers the big cities will come to an end.
The American cities of California are ahead in decarbonization, but others closer to us, such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Vienna, Dublin... Bilbao have committed themselves to rapid energy transition roadmaps.

Until we get closer to those cities and those dates, we will endure the convulsive gas market affected by multiple factors mentioned above, especially by the awakening of large countries such as China and India, whose economic growth considerably increases demand and thus the price.