Eco123 Revista da Economia e Ecologia
You have to stand up to stupidity and arrogance when you feel that enough is enough. Don’t you agree?
After a period of consultation and discussion, we at ECO 123 decided in 2010 to embark on a path to reduce our carbon footprint. We considered entrusting our money to a bank in Monchique. But they wanted to get rich at our expense. So we invested our money in clean electricity generation. A return of around twelve per cent.
In 2011, we then signed a production contract with EDP. At the time, we were among the first solar energy producers in Monchique and, for the first eight years, we received 38 cents per kWh of electricity fed into the grid. After that, the contract ran for a further seven years at a rate of 22 cents per kWh and is now, after 15 years, slowly coming to an end.
For some time now, EDP has stopped paying on time. Sometimes billing is delayed because they make absurd claims, for example, that they cannot read the production data. They claim that the connection, the communication via the SIM card between our two monitoring systems — comprising a total of 40 modules — and SU Eletricidade, which buys the electricity, is not working. What nonsense. Recently, I received an invoice (credit note) covering the period from November 2025 to May 2026, billed in a single day for a six-month production period. Sometimes in Portugal, a company can save money through fraud. Investors should be aware of this before investing here.
I’m going to make an equally bizarre claim. Ever since EDP sold a large portion of its shares to China, the management has been slow to pay up. I can’t prove it, nor do I want to; I simply want to put forward a bizarre claim whose truth vanishes into thin air when you look behind the scenes. I’m doing the same as e-redes.
Last week we received yet another email of this sort from the company e-redes, which belongs to EDP and is responsible for grid feed-in and the recording of the solar power we generate. And there it said once again that they couldn’t contact the meter and that we should hire a technician to ensure communication. “Your electricity meter is not transmitting any data…”
Listen, dear Fernanda Barbosa from e-redes. I wanted to give you a friendly reply today. But I can’t reply to you because you’re sending emails from an address that reads: no-reply@e-redes.pt…
We are now going to put a stop to this nonsense. Anyone who treats their customers with practices straight out of the Salazar era (and there are quite a few customers in Portugal who do just that) and dictates to the customer how they should respond will simply be blocked online from 15 June 2026. They can stick their emails where the sun don’t shine. I’ll then tell you that we can only be reached by phone or post, which would be just as daft, because what’s the internet for? Think carefully about how you treat your customers.
And yes, I’d be happy to provide you with the meter reading for our solar production by phone or perhaps even online, via ECO 123: 99,726 kWh since production began, so just under 100,000 cleanly produced kilowatt-hours. Today is 31 May. We took the meter reading at exactly 10 o’clock in the morning. If you’d like proof, we’ll take a photo of the meter reading to go with it.
If you can’t pay for our solar production on time, that’s no problem at all. Just get in touch. We offer payment by instalments. Improve your communication, and you’ll improve your ranking…
I can only advise any dissatisfied reader not to waste any more time on unnecessary discussions with EDP and its subsidiaries. Simply switch your electricity supplier. You could become a member of Portugal’s first electricity cooperative, at https://www.coopernico.org … They will help you there.
