PrecioLuzTomorrow’s Electricity Price in Spain Is Already Out Tonight
Tomorrow’s electricity price in Spain is not a forecast: it is decided, published and final before you sit down to dinner. It lands every evening at 20:15, which leaves you the whole night to plan around it.
Tomorrow’s electricity price in Spain is published every evening at 20:15, when Red Eléctrica, the grid operator, releases the PVPC — the regulated tariff — for each of the next day’s 24 hours. The wholesale auction behind it settles far earlier, around 13:05 on a normal day. The evening figures are final for billing, so nothing changes overnight.
When tomorrow’s price is published
Every evening, before 20:15, Red Eléctrica publishes the price of electricity for all 24 hours of the following day. It is not an estimate or a trend: it is the price you will be billed on.
That price is the PVPC, short for precio voluntario para el pequeño consumidor. It is Spain’s regulated tariff, the one that comes out of a formula in Royal Decree 216/2014 instead of being negotiated with a supplier. The decree obliges the system operator — Red Eléctrica — to publish the components of the production cost “before 20 hours 15 minutes on the day before supply”, and so it does: every day at 20:15 it publishes the hourly prices used to bill the energy term — the part that depends on how much you use — on the domestic 2.0TD tariff.
And they are final: those are the figures the reference suppliers bill on, with no later revision. That is where the practical value sits. By quarter past eight you already know what running the washing machine at seven tomorrow will cost, and you still have all evening to act on it. PrecioLuz sends an alert as soon as the figure lands, with tomorrow’s average, how it compares with today, and the cheapest stretch.
Why it can be known a day ahead
Because electricity is sold in an auction held the day before. It is called the day-ahead market, and OMIE, the Iberian electricity market operator, runs it: every morning generators state the price at which they will sell and suppliers the price at which they will buy, always for the following day. Under normal conditions, OMIE closes the reception and validation of bids at 12:00, mainland Spanish time.
From there, Spain does not decide alone. The clearing is resolved by Euphemia, the common algorithm of the European single day-ahead coupling, which settles prices and cross-border flows at the same time. Preliminary results are never published before 12:55; the firm ones arrive around 13:05, with no fixed time, and a normal session ends at about 13:15. Bids move between −600 and 4,000 €/MWh: the price can be negative.
One recent change almost nobody noticed: for energy delivered from 1 October 2025, the day-ahead market is no longer traded in hours but in fifteen-minute periods. A normal day has 96 prices; the last Sunday in March has 92, because it lasts 23 hours, and the last Sunday in October has 100.
From the auction price to your bill
The number that comes out at midday is not the number you pay. It is the main ingredient, not the dish.
On top of the hourly average market price, the PVPC formula adds an adjustment term that splits the signal between two worlds: the day-ahead and intraday markets are weighted 0.45, the forward market — electricity futures — 0.55. That futures basket is 54 % annual product, 36 % quarterly and 10 % monthly, each averaged over the quotations of the previous six, three and one months. More than half of that signal was settled months ago.
Then come the balancing services and other costs, grid losses are applied, and on top of the total sit Then come the balancing services and other costs, grid losses are applied, and on top of the total sit the peajes — the tolls for using the networks, set by the CNMC, Spain’s markets and competition regulator — and the cargos, the system charges set by the Government. Those two do not vary hour by hour but by peak, flat and off-peak bands: off-peak runs from 00:00 to 08:00, and Saturdays, Sundays, 6 January and fixed-date national holidays are off-peak all day. VAT and the Special Electricity Tax are added on top of the PVPC.
A detail that trips people up: even though the wholesale market now trades in quarter-hours, the PVPC is still hourly. Twenty-four values a day, labelled “00-01” through “23-24”, and twenty-five on the Sunday the clocks go back, with an extra “24-25” label.
OMIE hands Red Eléctrica the day-ahead and intraday market data before 20:00, and fifteen minutes later the PVPC goes out, already carrying at their real value the balancing services known by that hour.
What to do with it the evening before
- Compare tomorrow’s average with today’s. If tomorrow is dearer on average, bring forward tonight whatever you can; if it is cheaper, waiting costs you nothing.
- Look for the stretch, not the hour. A dishwasher takes two hours and charging a car takes several. The cheapest single hour is worth little if the next one spikes: what matters is the longest low stretch.
- Add the band on top. Peajes and cargos are at their lowest from 00:00 to 08:00 and all weekend, in Ceuta and Melilla too; what runs an hour later there are the peak and flat bands of the rest of the day. An hour that is cheap on the market and also falls in off-peak is cheap twice over.
- Set the timers before you go to bed. Washing machine, dishwasher, water heater, car charging. A cheap hour you sleep through is worth nothing.
- Tune the alert to what you consider expensive. There is no universal “cheap” price: it depends on your consumption and your contract. In PrecioLuz you set the thresholds of the colour scale yourself, and the alert fires the moment the price crosses into your cheap band or your expensive one.
If you have solar panels, the number that matters is not the PVPC but the wholesale price: that is the reference used to value your surplus. Compensation has a hard ceiling — the value of what you export can never exceed the value of the energy you took from the grid in that billing period — so it can bring your energy bill to zero, but never into your favour. And because negative prices cluster around midday, when solar output peaks and demand is soft, there are stretches where exporting does not pay. PrecioLuz flags those hours.
When the timetable slips
Everything above is the timetable of a normal day, and most days are. If the European calculation runs late, preliminary results can appear at any point between 12:55 and 14:20, the absolute deadline: past that hour full decoupling is declared and Spain and Portugal run their own local auction, with order books reopened for fifteen minutes. None of that shifts the PVPC’s 20:15, because there is slack to spare in between.
Since 29 January 2025, the Spanish market no longer has a second auction either: it was scrapped across fifteen countries at once to give the daily process room. If preliminary results are rejected today, a second calculation is launched, but market participants do not bid again.
And on the two clock-change Sundays the day does not have 24 hours: 23 in March, 25 in October. If you see an extra hour in the curve on the last Sunday of October, it is not an app bug — that day the price has one value more.
Tomorrow’s price, the moment it lands
Install PrecioLuz and get an alert every evening with tomorrow’s average, how it compares with today and the cheapest stretch. Free, no account, no ads.
Frequently asked questions
What time is tomorrow’s electricity price known in Spain?
The next day’s PVPC is published every evening before 20:15, when Red Eléctrica releases the price for each of the following 24 hours. The wholesale auction result behind it, which is its main ingredient, is known far earlier: around 13:05 on a normal day.
Can the price change after it is published?
Not for your bill. The values Red Eléctrica publishes that evening are final for billing by the reference suppliers, so what you see at 20:15 is what you will be charged hour by hour tomorrow.
Who sets the price of each hour of electricity?
Nobody sets it by hand. The market component comes out of a daily auction run by OMIE, the Iberian electricity market operator, cleared alongside the rest of Europe. On top of that result, the formula in Royal Decree 216/2014 adds the adjustment term, balancing services, grid losses, the network tolls set by the CNMC and the system charges set by the Government.
Is tomorrow’s price useful if I am not on the PVPC?
It depends on your contract, and it is worth knowing that only individuals and micro-enterprises with 10 kW contracted or less can take the PVPC. If your tariff charges the same per kWh at every hour, shifting consumption does not change what you pay for energy; if it is indexed to the market or to the PVPC, it does. For self-consumption, the surplus of a PVPC customer is valued at the hourly average price of the day-ahead and intraday markets, less deviation costs.