In April, We Told You Málaga's Grid Was Full. It Still Is. What Changed Is Who Owes You Money.

This summer we are going back through our own archive, issue by issue, and checking whether what we told you still holds. Today's subject ran on 8 April: six hours without power in El Pontil, the historic centre of Torrox Pueblo, while forty kilometres west in Estepona, 72 families who had bought finished homes in the Residencial Alma complex could not get the grid to connect them at all.

Our claim then was that these were the same story: Spain modernised the national grid and left the local red de distribución — distribution network sized for a Costa of twenty years ago, so old neighbourhoods lose power under new load while finished new builds cannot plug in. Málaga was one of eight fully saturated provinces in Spain. Our advice was to document outages, build some household redundancy, and never sign for a new build without the certificado de suministro eléctrico — electricity supply certificate.

Four months, two heat waves, and one regulator later, here is what held, what moved, and what we undersold.

The saturation eased on paper, not for Málaga. Andalucía has gone from six fully saturated provinces to three. Málaga is still one of them. Endesa is running a roughly €10 million 2026 reinforcement plan for the province, about 45% executed by mid-July, and the substation expansions that matter most, Ramos and Montes, add 300 MW of headroom but complete in 2028. New high-volume connections stay constrained for roughly two more years. Confirmed July 2026.

Estepona took Endesa to the referee, and won on points. In March the town hall filed a complaint with the CNMC, Spain's markets regulator, after Endesa rejected three municipal proposals to power the Alma building. On 18 May the CNMC sided with Estepona and ordered Endesa's distribution arm to evaluate grid access for 831.46 kW covering Alma's 72 homes and the 69 planned next door in La Calera. Endesa's public response: the ruling obliges a technical study, not a connection. So the scorecard reads: referee summoned, referee agreed, lights still off. April's warning stands with a sharper edge, because now we know that even a regulator's order moves this grid at the speed of a study.

Torrox went quiet. The near-daily El Pontil outages that filled the winter have not been reported since spring. Endesa's committed works, a new medium-voltage line from the Torrox substation and €350,000 of transformer reinforcement, are partly delivered, partly still in licensing. We will call that progress rather than resolution: the works bought quiet through spring, and August, when every air conditioner on the coast runs at once, is the real exam.

We told you to document outages and said compensation required filing a claim. That was half right, and the half we missed is the useful half. There are two separate tracks. Damage claims (the spoiled freezer, the fried router, the lost workday) do require a reclamación — formal complaint with evidence. But there is also an automatic track: if your distributor misses the annual supply-quality thresholds for your zone, more than five hours of interruptions or ten cuts a year in urban zones, it owes you a billing discount by law, applied in the first quarter of the following year without your asking.

"Automatic" earned its quotation marks: after the April 2025 blackout, the consumer group FACUA reported five distributors to the regulator for not applying those discounts. So the outage log we prescribed in April has a second job. It is your evidence for damages, and it is your audit trail for a discount that is supposed to appear on its own and sometimes does not. The updated electricity guide now covers both tracks, the zone thresholds, and the exact phrase for the claim, re-verified this month.

The price of getting this wrong changed shape since April. July's wholesale power closed 50% above last year, and solar has inverted the daily curve: on the regulated tariff, the last day of July priced 15:00 at €0.120 per kWh and 21:00 at €0.359, three times more. Confirmed July 2026.

That makes one household move do two jobs. Running the heavy loads, cooling included, between 12:00 and 17:00 cuts the bill by the ratio above, and it shifts your draw away from the evening peak, which is exactly when a saturated local segment is most likely to fail. The battery layer we suggested in April (€450 to €700 for router-and-laptop cover) now also buys arbitrage against that three-to-one spread; if you have a south-facing balcony, the balcony solar guide still applies. For buyers, nothing softened: the Alma saga is the documented proof that "the connection is in process" is not a yes, and the supply certificate question belongs in writing before any deposit

April's diagnosis held: Málaga's local grid is still officially saturated, the fix is priced in years, and both ends of the housing timeline keep paying for it, now with a CNMC ruling proving that even the referee cannot switch the lights on quickly. What improved is your side of the ledger: the price curve now pays you to run the house at three in the afternoon, and the compensation regime, once you know both tracks exist, turns your outage log into money. The grid will catch up around 2028. Your household can catch up this week.

Not bad for a Monday — A. and the WaypointSur team, running the dishwasher at 15:00 sharp.