Spain's PVPC Tariff: Saving on Hourly Regulated Prices

If you’re on Spain’s regulated electricity tariff — the PVPC (Precio Voluntario para el Pequeño Consumidor) — the price you pay changes every single hour of the day, and tomorrow’s 24 prices are published the evening before. That’s unusual: most of the world’s households pay either a flat rate or a few fixed time blocks. The PVPC is fully hourly, which makes it a natural fit for automation. This guide explains how it works and how to actually capture the savings.

How the PVPC works

The PVPC is the regulated retail tariff set by the Spanish system operator’s methodology, and it’s the price the customer actually pays — energy, tolls, and charges included. Unlike a wholesale feed, there’s nothing extra to add on top: the published number is your billable hourly rate.

Two things make it different from a fixed tariff:

• A new price every hour. The day is split into 24 hourly prices, and each one moves with the market. Tomorrow’s full curve is published around 8:15 p.m. the evening before, via the operator’s public ESIOS data portal.
• The cheap hours move. Overnight and, increasingly, sunny midday hours tend to be the cheapest, while the early evening tends to be the most expensive — but the exact shape is different every day, driven by demand, wind, and Spain’s large and growing solar output.

There’s no fixed schedule to memorise. The best time to run a load tomorrow is a genuinely different set of hours than it was today.

Where the savings are

Because the cheapest hours shift day to day, the wins come from reacting to each day’s price curve:

• EV charging during whatever the cheapest overnight (or midday-solar) stretch happens to be tonight — not a fixed “after midnight” rule, but the actual low point.
• Pre-cooling or pre-heating ahead of the expensive evening hours, so your air-conditioning or heat pump coasts through the peak.
• Water heating, washing machines, and dishwashers timed to the day’s troughs and away from its peaks.

You’re not using less energy. You’re using it in the hours it’s cheap.

How to capture it: by hand vs. automatically

By hand, you’d check the next day’s 24 published prices each evening, cross-reference the weather, and reprogram your EV charger, thermostat, and appliances around the cheapest hours — every day. Almost nobody sustains that. And even if you did, you’d still be guessing how much pre-cooling your home actually needs.

Automatically is the whole point of a tariff like this. Hungry Machines pulls the next day’s hourly PVPC prices, combines them with tomorrow’s forecast plus a custom model of your home, then builds an optimised schedule each night. It charges the EV in the genuine cheapest window, pre-conditions just enough to skate past the expensive evening, and times your water heater and other loads to the day’s cheapest energy. Then it does it all again tomorrow against tomorrow’s new prices.

Because the PVPC is a true retail feed, the price the optimiser plans against is the exact price you’ll be billed — no estimation, no markup to guess at.

Common questions

Is the PVPC cheaper than a fixed-rate tariff?

Usually, for households that can shift load — but not always, and the honest answer is that it depends on your consumption shape rather than on the tariff alone.

The PVPC passes through the hourly wholesale price with no retailer hedging margin, so on average you pay less than a fixed contract that has to price in risk. Spain’s high solar and wind share also pushes midday prices very low, and occasionally to zero. The trade is that when prices spike you feel it immediately, with no contract cushioning the move.

A household that runs its washing machine, dishwasher, water heater and EV charging in the cheap hours generally comes out ahead. One whose consumption is fixed and concentrated in the expensive evening may pay more than a fixed tariff would have cost.

What happens during a price spike?

You pay the spike, hour by hour, with no cap smoothing it out — that is the defining feature of a regulated pass-through tariff. Spikes typically arrive on cold winter evenings when wind output is low and demand peaks, or during gas-market disruption.

Two things soften this in practice. Because PVPC prices for all 24 hours are published the day before, a spike is visible in advance rather than a surprise — you can see at 8 p.m. today that tomorrow’s 8 p.m. will be expensive. And spikes are concentrated in a small number of hours, so the annual bill is driven far more by the many ordinary hours than by the few dramatic ones.

The practical response is to shift what you can out of the flagged hours and accept the rest.

Do I need solar to benefit?

No. PVPC savings come from when you draw grid power, and the cheapest hours are available to every customer whether or not there are panels on the roof. Spain’s solar-heavy generation mix is precisely why midday is often the cheapest window — you benefit from the country’s solar build-out without owning any of it.

Solar changes the shape of the problem rather than removing it. Panels already cover much of your midday consumption, so for a solar home the remaining opportunity concentrates in the evening peak and the overnight hours, where a battery or a scheduled EV charge does the work.

What actually decides the benefit is how much of your load is time-flexible: water heating, laundry, EV charging and air conditioning are movable, and that is true with or without a roof array.

Next steps

The PVPC’s hourly structure is close kin to the day-ahead markets across the rest of Europe — see our guide to European day-ahead electricity prices. For the wider picture on how variable rates work, start with our guide to time-of-use electricity rates. For the software category itself, see our guide to home energy management systems.

To let your home react to the PVPC automatically, see how Hungry Machines works and sign up now.