The Class of Three Thousand Kilowatt-Hours

Dear Young Comrades,

Deniz Yavuzyılmaz, the Member of Parliament for Zonguldak, shared a warning on X (for the news item, see Koza TV). By a decision the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK) took yesterday, households whose yearly electricity use exceeds 3,000 kilowatt-hours will be taken off the fixed-price tariff in 2027 and tied to the market price. On Yavuzyılmaz's calculation, the bill of a household that uses 250 kilowatt-hours a month rises from 822 TL to 1,676 TL, an increase of 104 per cent. In another example a bill of 1,226 TL rises to 2,233 TL, an increase of 82 per cent. His proposal is also plain: reduce consumption in November and December, and keep your 2026 total under 3,000 kilowatt-hours.

The warning is well placed, and it matters. But in this essay I want to take one step further. Because what is in front of us is not only a "trap". There is a method that has been working, step by step, for years. The only way out that method offers us, saving by going cold at home, shows the problem itself.

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In Brief: Six Theses

1. The decision is real, and it is large. At its board meeting of 30 October 2026, EPDK lowered the household threshold from 4,000 kilowatt-hours to 3,000. About 6.5 million of the roughly 44.2 million residential subscribers, that is 14.7 per cent, will move onto the unsupported tariff.
2. This is the third step of a series. The threshold was 5,000 kilowatt-hours in 2025; it is 4,000 in 2026, and 3,000 in 2027. A year ago the number of subscribers affected was 2.5 million. In one year another 4 million households were added.
3. The threshold is not a measure of "wealth". Two hundred and fifty kilowatt-hours a month is not a luxury. Large families, people who have no natural gas and heat with electricity, people who work from home, and people who live by air conditioning in the heat of Adana or Antalya cross this line easily. On the Chamber of Electrical Engineers' calculation, a family of four uses about 230 kilowatt-hours a month for its basic needs, without heating or cooling. The threshold sits just above that.
4. The "last two months" warning is not enough on its own. The threshold looks not only at 2026 but also at consumption in 2027. Someone who closes 2026 under the line and then crosses it in 2027 will still be moved. For someone who has already crossed it in the October reading, the matter is already over.
5. The way out offered to us is energy poverty. In the middle of winter, "reduce your consumption" means, in practice, "do not heat, run the washing machine less, turn the light off". We pay for a lower bill with our health.
6. The problem runs deeper than one party's ill will. The market regime that turned electricity into a commodity was founded in 2001. The AKP deepened that regime for 24 years; today's decision is the natural result of that logic. The answer is not an individual precaution. It is to win electricity back as a public right.

Now let us go into the detail.

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What Does the Decision Say?

Let us first make the facts clear, because the figures circulating on social media sometimes get mixed up.

The history of the threshold:

Year	Yearly threshold for households	Monthly average	Subscribers affected
2025	5,000 kWh	~417 kWh	—
2026	4,000 kWh	~333 kWh	~2.5 million (6%)
2027	3,000 kWh	~250 kWh	~6.5 million (14.7%)

What happens when the threshold is crossed? According to the EPDK statement reported by soL Haber, subscribers who cross the line and have no bilateral agreement with a supplier move onto the "high-consumption last-resort supply tariff", on which the active-energy charge is calculated from the market clearing price and the YEKDEM costs. The distribution charge does not change. That is, you leave the "supported" tariff, on which the state has until now met part of the price, and you pay the price of electricity on the exchange.

When does the move happen? On the first day of the third month after the month in which the threshold was crossed:

• If the 2026 total exceeds 3,000 kilowatt-hours in the October 2026 reading → 1 January 2027
• If it is crossed in the December 2026 reading → 1 March 2027
• If 2026 is closed under the line and the line is crossed in the June 2027 reading → 1 September 2027

Who is exempt? Mosques, places of worship, cemevis and associations; families of the fallen, and combat and disabled veterans; village drinking water; AFAD temporary shelter centres; consumers who depend on a life-support device such as dialysis or a respirator. The threshold of 15,000 kilowatt-hours for agriculture, industry, public and private services, and lighting did not change.

Look at this list carefully. We will come back to it.

One correction: The threshold works in kilowatt-hours, not in lira. Figures such as 9,864 TL, or "820 TL a month", are approximate calculations made with today's tariff. They change as the tariff changes. To understand your own situation, do not add up the lira on the bill. Add up the kilowatt-hours in your consumption history.

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Let Us Give the "Last Two Months" Warning Its Due, and Show Its Limit

Yavuzyılmaz's proposal really does work for one group: households that have come close to 3,000 kilowatt-hours in 2026 but have not yet crossed it. By using a little less in November and December, these households can avoid moving onto the unsupported tariff at the start of 2027. Knowing this is a right, and the warning is valuable for that reason.

But three points have to be said plainly.

First, for those who crossed the line in the October reading, nothing remains to be done. Their move begins on 1 January 2027.

Second, the matter does not end in two months. The rule looks at each calendar year separately. Those who are saved in 2026 by a hair's breadth will have to make the same calculation every month through 2027. Between winter heating and summer cooling, staying under 250 kilowatt-hours a month means, for many households, a tightening of the belt that lasts the whole year.

Third, the threshold keeps falling. From 5,000 to 4,000, from 4,000 to 3,000. What will the household that is saved today do if next year the line falls to 2,000? An individual precaution only postpones the next decision by a year.

In short, individual saving can dress this year's wound. The cause of the wound stays where it is. The Chamber of Electrical Engineers also calls this link unlawful: electricity already used in 2026 is punished under a 2027 threshold that is not yet in force. The chamber calls it a retroactive rule.

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Who Crosses Three Thousand Kilowatt-Hours?

The assumption behind the decision is this: whoever uses a lot of electricity is wealthy, and the state should not support the wealthy. It sounds fair. Is that the reality?

Let us look at who crosses 250 kilowatt-hours a month:

The "high consumer" the decision assumes	Who actually crosses the line
A villa with a pool, many air conditioners, a luxury life	Large working families in which five or six people live in the same home
A household that wastes electricity and will not be bothered to save	Neighbourhoods with no natural-gas line, forced to heat with an electric stove or an air conditioner
A home with more appliances than it needs	A tech worker or a call-centre worker who works from home and whose computer stays on all day
The wealthy person who can easily cut consumption	The elderly, infants and the sick who cannot live without air conditioning in the heat of Adana, Antalya and Mersin
"Luxury"	A tenant whose combi boiler has broken, who cannot afford the repair, and who gets by with a heater

There is a basic error of method here. The amount of consumption does not show the level of income. A wealthy household can have solar panels fitted, live in a new home with insulation, buy energy-efficient A+++ appliances, and stay under the line. A poor household, in an old building without insulation, with an old refrigerator and an electric heater, obtains the same heat with twice the energy. The threshold punishes the person who cannot spend money on efficiency.

The same day, the Chamber of Electrical Engineers of the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (TMMOB) tied this objection to a figure. The minimum living standard of a family of four, excluding heating, cooling and hot water, is at least 230 kilowatt-hours a month, 2,760 kilowatt-hours a year. That includes lighting, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a dishwasher and a television. It does not include a water heater, an air conditioner or an electric stove. So the line of 3,000 is not the pool pump of a villa. It is the kitchen of an ordinary family. The chamber's sentence is plain: this hidden price rise is not "a market mechanism aimed at high consumption". It is a practice that abandons even the most basic need of life to market conditions (EMO, 31 October 2026).

One more detail: the threshold is set per household, not per person. In a flat where one person lives, 250 kilowatt-hours is plenty. In a family of six it is scarcity. Large families are usually poor families. So the decision, in practice, catches the largest and poorest households more often.

Look at the exemption list with the same eye. Places of worship and associations are exempt. There is no such exception for the household of a low-income pensioner, a minimum-wage worker, an unemployed person or a student. Household income and the number of people are not the measure of exemption. Whom the state protects, and whom it leaves to the market, is plain on this list.

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What Does "Reduce Your Consumption" Mean in the Middle of Winter?

November and December are heating months in most of Türkiye. How does a worker's family reduce its consumption in these months?

• It turns the electric heater on less, which means it is cold at home.
• It lets the laundry and the dishes pile up, and it cuts the hot water.
• It turns off early the light in the room where the child does homework.
• If someone works from home, they charge the computer in a café or a library.

The name of this is energy poverty: a household's inability to meet the heating, lighting and basic energy it needs for a healthy life. Remember that in the energy crisis of 2022 in Europe, millions of people faced the dilemma of "heat or eat". A cold home means, especially for the elderly and for children, respiratory illness and winter deaths.

There is a fine but important point here. Every lira cut from the bill is, most of the time, cut from health, from the conditions in which a child studies, or from an older person's comfort. This cost does not appear on the bill. It is written down somewhere else: in the hospital, at school, in the tension at home.

For this reason we should not preach individual saving to anyone as "a moral virtue". Let us share it as information, but let us underline it: an order that tells us "use less" is in fact saying "cut your own need".

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Not a Trap, a Method: The History of Electricity Becoming a Commodity

Yavuzyılmaz calls the decision "the AKP's trap". He is right to place the responsibility on the government. But if we explain this decision only by one party's ill will, we cannot see the structure behind it.

A short chronology:

• 2001: During the IMF programme, the Electricity Market Law No. 4628 was passed. Electricity was defined no longer as a public service but as a product bought and sold inside a "market". EPDK was founded by this law.
• 2008–2013: The electricity distribution regions were privatised one by one. The companies that send the bill today are, in large part, companies in the hands of construction and energy holdings.
• The energy exchange and the PTF: The price of electricity began to be set by the market clearing price (PTF), on a market that is formed hour by hour.
• YEKDEM: Purchase guarantees indexed to foreign currency were given to renewable-energy producers. This cost is passed on to the bill.
• After 2022: With the jump in energy prices, the state partly subsidised the residential tariff. But in the same years the aim of "narrowing the subsidy" began to be spoken of openly.
• The last-resort threshold from 2018 to today: The last-resort supply tariff began in 2018 only for very large industrial plants, at 50 million kilowatt-hours a year. The series in EMO's statement of 31 October runs as follows: 7 million in 2020, 1 million in 2023, 5,000 in 2025, 4,000 in 2026, 3,000 in 2027. In eight years the line came down from the industrial giant to the kitchen socket. The subsidy is being narrowed not by a direct price rise but by pulling the threshold down.

The method here is striking. If a general price rise were made, everyone would react at the same time. Lowering the threshold a little every year means declaring a new section of society a "high consumer" each year and handing it to the market. Society is split. Those under the line relax, saying "it did not touch me", while those above it begin to pay alone. The next year the turn of the next section comes.

This is the process of taking electricity out of being a right and turning it, step by step, into a complete commodity. It is the result of the market regime founded in 2001. The AKP did not merely inherit this regime. It deepened it for 24 years. Let us turn our class question here:

• In whose hands? Production and distribution are, in large part, in the hands of private holdings.
• Under whose control? The price is set on the exchange and in the decisions of the regulatory board. The consumer, that is the people, has no say.
• To whose benefit? Narrowing the support opens room in the public budget. That room goes to interest payments, to incentives given to capital, and to purchase guarantees. The cost is paid from the household budget.

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The "Become an Eligible Consumer" Proposal

Messages have begun to arrive from the distribution companies to subscribers who cross the line: you can make a bilateral agreement, and the list of suppliers is on the EPDK website. That is, "if you do not want to move onto the market tariff, find yourself a seller in the market."

For some households this proposal can really mean a cheaper price in the short term. Comparing contracts is not a bad idea. But pay attention to this: details such as the length of the fixed price, the exit fee, and clauses indexed to the market price sit in the small print of the contract. A single household with no bargaining power is weak against a large supply company. Being pushed into the market as an individual "customer" means putting a buyer–seller relation in the place of a public right.

EMO rejects this rationale too. It writes that the talk of "encouraging competition" and of "steering high consumption into bilateral agreements" does not reflect the reality. The subscriber who falls onto the last-resort tariff pays the market clearing price on the spot exchange, and foreign-currency-linked charges such as YEKDEM. The freedom to choose a supplier has remained on paper. The discourse of competition, in the chamber's words, hides a transfer of profit to private companies.

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What Does the Chamber Say?

On 31 October 2026 the 50th-term board of the Chamber of Electrical Engineers published a statement titled "Lowering the Last-Resort Limit Buries 2027 in Darkness". It called the decision unacceptable, and a concealed price rise. The same text also appeared in Anka Haber. No separate statement from the unions or the parties is visible today. The institutional text came from the chamber.

The chamber's demand does not end in one sentence:

1. The decision should be withdrawn at once. Households should be taken entirely out of the scope of the last-resort supply tariff.
2. Energy should be rebuilt on the principles of public production and a social tariff. The way to bring costs down is not tenders with purchase and price guarantees. It is direct public investment.
3. A vertically integrated public monopoly should be rebuilt, from production to distribution. For the transition, instead of an open-ended transfer of public resources to the private sector, the chamber asks for an Expropriation Administration to carry out the taking into public ownership.

The chamber also recalls that it went to court when the threshold was lowered onto households, calling that a hidden price rise. It reads the further fall of a thousand kilowatt-hours every year, while those cases continue, as the setting aside of judicial review and of the public interest. Electricity, in the chamber's sentence, is "not a market good, but a public service".

These demands come to the same door as the class judgment of this essay: to take electricity back from the market. The difference is that the chamber has put this on the table today as an institutional call. The text to be spread is no longer an assessment we are waiting for. The text has been written.

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What Is to Be Done? Individual Precaution and a Social Demand

I am not going to end this essay by saying "do not save". Protecting oneself is every household's right. But the individual precaution must not be separated from the social demand.

What a household can do at once

1. Check your consumption in kilowatt-hours. Add up the amounts of consumption on your bills from January 2026 to today. If you cannot reach the bills, ask for your consumption history from the online service centre of your distribution or supply company.
2. If you are close to the line, do what can be done without putting your health at risk: turn off appliances on standby, and use the water heater and the washing machine more efficiently. But never write the heat in the room of the elderly, of infants or of the sick down as an item of "saving".
3. If someone in your family uses a life-support device, be sure to apply for the exemption.
4. If an offer of a bilateral agreement has come, before you sign, ask in writing what the exit fee is, how long the fixed price lasts, and what the price is indexed to.
5. Talk with your neighbour and with your building. Who has crossed the line, who has received a message, whose bill has risen by how much? Sharing this information is the first step of organising.

What has to be said socially

1. A basic right to energy: For every household, a basic amount of electricity, set according to the number of people, should be free or priced very low. Electricity, water and heating are not a luxury. They are a condition of life.
2. The threshold should be set by income, not by consumption: Support should be determined not by kilowatt-hours but by household income and the number of people. The owner of a villa and a worker's family of six cannot be held to the same measure.
3. A rising, tiered tariff: Consumption at the level of need should be cheap, and consumption at the level of luxury should be expensive. Today's system works the other way round: the moment you cross the line, all of your consumption becomes expensive.
4. A right to heating: Infrastructure for neighbourhoods with no natural-gas line, and insulation support, by public means, for old buildings. Instead of punishing the household that is forced to heat with electricity, it has to be freed from that compulsion.
5. Transparency: A public account must be given of the YEKDEM purchase guarantees, of the profits of the distribution companies, and of the "loss and theft" charges.
6. Public ownership: In the long run the only lasting answer is a return, from the production of electricity to its distribution, to public ownership and democratic control. In energy, need should be the measure, not profit.

Concrete tasks

• Hold "bill solidarity" meetings at the level of the neighbourhood, the building and the workplace, and document the rising bills collectively.
• Spread EMO's call of 31 October: the decision should be withdrawn, and households should be taken out of the last-resort tariff. Ask the unions and the other chambers to take up this text.
• Carry the demand for a "basic right to energy" onto the local agenda through city councils and municipalities.
• Through the winter, collect testimonies that document energy poverty: who was cold, and who gave up which need? These testimonies make visible the real cost of the "use less" discourse.

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Dear Comrades,

The most instructive side of this decision is the solution that is offered to us. If a government tells its people "reduce your consumption in winter", and if the opposition too can advise the same thing as the best precaution, the problem runs deeper than one year's decision. An order that turns electricity into a commodity also names our need "excessive consumption".

The line falls a little further every year. We can keep up with that fall by cutting ourselves a little more every year, or we can raise our voices together for an order that takes need as its measure rather than one that cuts need. The first is an individual strategy of endurance. The second is a struggle for a right.

Let us not put our light out. Heating our homes, our children studying under a light, and our elders not being cold are not a matter for bargaining.

Electricity is a right, as much as the bread on the table.

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