Warning to electricity consumers. It was supposed to be cheaper, but it ended up being more expensive

• From August 2024, individual customers and micro-entrepreneurs can conclude a contract with a dynamic price.
• Last year, only 135 recipients did so.
• This was not profitable for them - most of them paid more for electricity than they would have paid under other types of contracts covered by the maximum price.

Individual customers and micro-entrepreneurs have had the option of concluding a contract with a dynamic price since 24 August 2024. Last year, from the beginning of the operation of contracts with a dynamic price until December 2024, only 135 customers took advantage of it.

The characteristic feature of dynamic price contracts is that the price is set separately for each hour with a short notice, depending on the change in the price quoted on the energy exchange. This, in turn, can change even every 15 minutes.

In the case of a dynamic price linked to prices on the Day Ahead Market of the Polish Power Exchange (RDN TGE), the prices applicable on day "n" are published on day "n-1" at 2:00 p.m. (e.g. prices for Monday are published on Sunday afternoon ). Therefore, the customer does not know how much he will pay for electricity in a given week, even if he precisely plans his consumption for each hour for the entire week in advance.

The greatest potential for benefiting from dynamic price contracts is for customers with high energy consumption, such as those who heat their homes with electricity or have air conditioning. The opportunity for cheaper electricity appears with the surplus of energy in the system, but at the same time it means the risk of a high price when there is less energy and it is impossible to give up its consumption.

One of the conditions for using a dynamic price contract is to have an intelligent measurement and billing system that enables automatic collection, transmission and settlement of measurement data.

The average price is most often calculated by multiplying the hourly retail selling price of energy (usually determined as the rate from Fixing I on the TGE Day-Ahead Market), increased by a cost factor and possibly a margin, by the volume of energy consumed in a given hour.

In addition to increasing the wholesale price by cost factors and margin, most sellers also charge monthly fixed (subscription) fees. In the analyzed period, the markup on the wholesale price ranged from PLN 0.0999/kWh to PLN 0.149/kWh. In turn, the subscription fee rate ranged from PLN 0 to PLN 49.9.

Average monthly prices for all customers using dynamic price contracts were significantly higher than the average wholesale prices from the TGE RDN .

In 2024, dynamic price contracts were not covered by the consumer protection mechanism in the form of a maximum price of PLN 500/MWh (PLN 0.5/kWh) net, which was available to household consumers in the period covered by the study by the President of the Energy Regulatory Office, while the weighted average dynamic price for all consumers from September to December 2024 exceeded PLN 0.5/kWh. For this reason , it can be assumed that most of them paid more for electricity in this period than they would have paid under other types of contracts covered by the maximum price.

Moreover, since the average price from at least one of the sellers exceeded PLN 0.7/kWh each month, some customers paid more for energy than they would have paid under contracts based on the currently applicable tariff of the President of the Energy Regulatory Office, without taking into account the price freeze.