After weeks of pressing in favor of a new maneuver against the Dear Energy, Prime Minister Mario Draghi broke the delay by delivering the response that political forces and businesses had long awaited. So on Wednesday from Genoa, where he flew for a series of institutional meetings and for the visit to the construction sites of the project Terzo Valico dei Giovi-Nodo Di Genova, the first of a series of stops in the symbolic places of the restart (the next on February 23 in Florence and then in the South), the president of the Council announced a new intervention to further reduce the costs of bills and said he was sure that all the objectives of the Pnrr will be met again this year. “The government does not forget the present and the present today shows us a reality characterized by the difficulties that families and businesses have for electricity prices. I wanted to use this circumstance to say that the government is preparing a wide-ranging intervention in the coming days”.
The “wide-ranging”intervention
The technicians are therefore working to put together the necessary resources for a new package of measures that should arrive, but the conditional is a must, at the Cdm next week and which comes less than a month away from the green light to the support decree ter, now before Parliament. It must be said that the definitive amount of the measure, as well as the contents, are still being defined even if on Wednesday the undersecretary at the Mef, Cecilia Guerra, anticipated some guidelines to the microphones of Tg3 talking about a figure “between 5 and 7 billion”. For 2022, 5.5 billion has been allocated, said the leu exponent, “we will double this figure, but it is not the time to decide on a deviation”. As for the measures, the objective is to intervene “on several fronts” because the increase in energy bills “affects many subjects, starting with families, especially the weakest, but also businesses and local authorities: let’s keep in mind how much the energy bill costs to keep hospitals and intensive care Open”, added Guerra and then specify that part of the next intervention “will strengthen the measures in place on social bonuses”.
The audience covered by the benefit
The orientation of the Executive, therefore, would seem directed first of all to shore up the supports guaranteed to the weakest groups. As you will remember, already with the previous measures, the social bonuses have been enhanced, that is to say the discount on the bill provided for families with economic and physical discomfort, in order to zero the effects of the increases in electricity and gas. Already in recent months, however, the possibility had also been aired, then remained in the drawers, to enlarge the number of recipients of the benefit (currently provided for those who have an Isee not exceeding 8,265 euros or 20 thousand euros in the case of families with at least four dependent children, in addition to income or pension recipients of citizenship). A hypothesis that would have now returned to relevance, it being understood that any enlargement will raise the bar of the needs necessary to ensure the refreshments to a wider audience that today counts 3 million households for the electricity bonus and 2.5 million for the gas one.
Measures for industry
As for possible measures in favour of industry, there is still no final point of fall. But the government would have lit a beacon on two hypotheses of intervention, moreover at the center of the package of requests already advanced in recent weeks by the same companies. The first track would refer to a sort of exchange mechanism whereby, in the face of a transfer of renewable electricity “delivered” to the Gse for about 25 teraatt This measure, which would cost about 3 billion euros per year for 2022 and 2023, would then be joined by the other piece that is worth 1.5 billion euros for 2022 alone and to a lesser extent the following year and which would concern the increase in national gas production of about 3 billion cubic meters per year and then arrive, here too, at a sale at controlled rates to large industrial consumers of gas. The comparison is open: the companies want a strong signal and the government is looking for a squaring of the circle with an eye also to Bruell
Where to find funds
So far, therefore, the framework of the measures under study that would still affect the next quarter. It is clear, however, that at the moment the priority is to recover resources, starting from the few certain points: the proceeds from ETS auctions (up to 3.5 billion, it is estimated) and the residues from unused emergency bonuses (another billion). The rest of the funds are all to be recovered. Aware that there are other ways forward, as recalled in the hearing the president of Arera, Stefano Besseghini, from whom came the hope “that some of the measures envisaged by recent legislative interventions are made structural, among which, in particular, the stable destination of the revenue deriving from auctions for the allocation of CO2 emission allowances to the reduction of general system charges, as well as to use structurally funds from the state budget to finance general charges not strictly related to the energy system” .