Another Lesson in Learning How to Live Well Here
In my last post, I said that we’re no longer figuring out how to live here, we’re figuring out how to live well here.
Apparently, that includes getting strangely excited about an electricity bill.
When we first moved into our apartment in Valencia, our electricity bills seemed reasonable enough. The landlord had the electricity set up with Iberdrola, one of Spain’s largest electricity providers, and everything worked. The lights came on. The air conditioning kept us from melting during the summer. Money disappeared from our bank account every month.
All was well … except that gradually, the bills started getting higher.
There wasn’t any obvious reason for it. We hadn’t suddenly acquired an electric kiln or started illuminating the neighborhood. Our habits hadn’t changed dramatically. But the amount we were paying certainly had.
For quite a while, I did what I suspect most of us do with utility bills – paid them.
Electricity is one of those expenses I’ve always tended to regard as unavoidable. You need it, and someone provides it. A bill arrives; you grumble a little and pay it.
Eventually, though, I decided to see whether we had other options. And this is where things got interesting.
Spain has a competitive electricity market, and consumers have access to tools that make it relatively easy to compare providers and plans. What particularly surprised me was how much information about comparison shopping is provided right on the electricity bill itself, including access to an official comparison service.
Think about that for a moment. The company currently selling you electricity is legally required to give you information that makes it easier to discover whether somebody else could sell it to you for less. There is an official comparison site that uses your actual consumption information to show what competing offers could cost you, so you can easily compare apples to apples.
Coming from the United States, I found this slightly astonishing. It’s like Santa Claus sending shoppers to Gimbels in Miracle on 34th Street.
So, I started comparing.
I eventually settled on Octopus Energy. They weren’t the cheapest option, but they seemed easy to deal with. Their price was considerably better than Iberdrola’s, the terms were straightforward, and I decided to make the switch.
It was incredibly easy. We made the request, Octopus handled the change, and at some point the company sending us the bill became a different company.
There was no technician. Nobody came to the apartment. The electricity wasn’t disconnected. We didn’t have to change a meter or schedule an appointment. As far as the actual electricity flowing into our home was concerned, absolutely nothing happened.
Of course, there was still one important question: would we actually save any money?
Our first Octopus bill recently arrived, and it was about 40 percent lower than what we’d been paying Iberdrola. Same apartment, same appliances, same people, and same air conditioning working valiantly against a Valencian summer.
Now, one bill isn’t enough to declare victory. Electricity use varies, seasons change, rates change, and I’ll want to see what happens over the next several months.
But 40 percent certainly got my attention.
More than the savings themselves, though, the experience made me think about something else.
Some of the bills I used to regard as unavoidable suddenly aren’t. The electricity bill still has to be paid, that’s unavoidable, but the amount isn’t.
That’s a distinction I hadn’t thought very much about before.
There’s also something refreshing about a system that doesn’t just theoretically allow competition but makes it relatively easy for consumers to participate in it. I didn’t need to become an expert on the Spanish electricity market. I didn’t need to spend days navigating bureaucracy. I compared the alternatives, made a decision, and switched.
And now I’m paying considerably less for exactly the same electricity.
That’s the sort of thing I meant when I wrote about learning how to live well here.
During our first year in Valencia, much of our energy went into figuring things out. How does this work? Who do we call? Where do we go? What form do we need? Are we even allowed to do this?
Now we’re starting to ask different questions.
Is this still the best option?
Could we be doing this differently?
Are we paying more than we need to?
And increasingly, we’re discovering that the answers are worth looking for.
I never expected an electricity bill to become part of learning how to live well in Spain.
But then again, I never expected to be excited about an electricity bill, either.