Croatia: Electricity market, households leaving HEP DSO and crossing to cheaper suppliers

In a year, since electricity market in Croatia have been liberalized, only 4.5 percent of households, or about 95.000, left HEP Distribution. These households have crossed to a cheaper variant, buying electricity from one of the four market suppliers (HT, RWE, GEN-I and HEP supply).

To such low consumer interest certainly contributed a fact that so far there were no clear rules for changing suppliers, which created uncertainty among customers, wrote Tportal, adding that it would soon be changed, because the Croatian Energy Regulatory Agency (HERA) recently launched a public discussion for the adoption of the Rules.

President of the Croatian Union of Associations for Consumer Protection, Nenad Kurtovic, warns of another brake of faster development of the electricity market.

“In the Energy Law there is a provision under which the status of vulnerable customers, meaning those that state is helping, may have only those who stay at HEP Distribution on universal service. This is absurd, because the state, in that way, is stimulating to stay on expensive energy tariff,” Kurtovic said.

He agrees that the number of those who have crossed to market suppliers too small, but considering the situation, looking at the amount of energy that is no longer covered by HEP Distribution, it is not so bad.

“It must be considered that there is a significant number of households that use more than 5.000 kWh of electricity per year, and some are over 15.000 kWh.’s Only for such great consumers is most cost-effective to switch supplier in the market,” he says, adding that those 95.000 households that left HEP distribution probably makes around 16 percent of total consumption, which is more than one billion kWh of electricity per year.

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