Source: Revista Electricidad/DF, 06.06.18
Large customers suffer a sharp rise in electricity costs due to the new tariff system: The socialization of this charge among all the users of the system caused this increase, which in some cases involved tripling the payment for this concept. Several large electricity consumers, in different parts of the country, have faced a significant rise in their energy costs a few months ago, derived from the change in the system with which the charge for the use of transmission lines is applied, as a result of the legal reform promoted by former minister Máximo Pacheco. In addition to establishing that the demand takes over 100% of the energy transport rate (prior to the legal adjustment it was only 20%), the change included, as a way to simplify the calculations, the socialization of the cost of transporting energy energy among all users, under a stamp model for the use of electrical networks.
The problem is now occurring in intermediate networks, today called zonal transmission and, previously, subtransmission. Before, in this segment, the payment corresponded to the effective use of the network by users to receive their energy. In this way, those who are closer to the withdrawal point of the main or national system (previously called the trunk) paid less because their transit through these lines was more limited than that of those who were further away and, therefore, paid more. “The biggest problem today is in the zonal transmission and in the costs that this implies to the final consumer, because here socialization harms those who are close to the trunk systems or, simply, do not use certain parts of the zonal systems. Indeed, an industry or a mining client put the cost of transportation (sub-transmission) in their economic evaluation and minimized it with the location.
Today that equation has become useless, since socialization strongly affects those who are connected very close to the large systems and favors those who were further away, ”explains Francisco Aguirre, director of Electroconsultores, who supported this simplification of rates in the committees of discussion of the reform, in force since the beginning of 2017. In the industry, they comment that there are clients for whom this charge has tripled. The National Economic Prosecutor's Office in a report on the electricity market, which it delivered a couple of weeks ago to the Tribunal for the Defense of Free Competition, estimates that if with the previous scheme the sub-transmission represented around 2.4% of the electricity cost of free customer, in the current scenario the weight of this element increases to 8.7%. The consultant and past president of the Association of Unregulated Energy Consumers (ACENOR), Elías Valenzuela, comments that the stamp establishes a unique value for the zonal areas that were defined, being the section between San Fernando and Temuco (zone E), the that has the highest value to finance. "In this sector there were cases of increases for the year 2018 of the order of US $ 5 million compared to the payment of the previous year," he says.
Other specialists mention the areas surrounding the SIC-SING interconnection - the Antofagasta and Atacama regions - as other areas where these increases have been felt more strongly. It adds that as a result of the foregoing and since the law speaks of a charge for use, the possibility was opened to review the calculation methodology by the authority, giving rise to a proposal to separate the stamp by voltage levels, which that would mitigate these excessive increases. “Initially, for the same zone system E, where it was determined to pay $ 9.52 / kWh, if the adjustment is approved there would be differentiated tranches, from $ 0.35 per kWh to $ 10.32 per kWh, depending on the level of voltage where energy withdrawals are made ”, says Valenzuela. The objective of the reform to the transmission law, according to the consultant Elías Valenzuela, is to eliminate entry barriers and transmission limitations to encourage competition and development of the generation sector, simplifying its associated costs. The foregoing implies that the cost of transport and network expansion is distributed among all consumers regardless of the type, assigning a unit cost, which, in Francisco Aguirre's opinion, does not change much with respect to the previous law, except that The irruption of NCRE causes the need for a strong expansion of the networks, which increases costs. "The regulation eliminates the costs that it assigned to generators and charges 100% to final consumers, with the consequent significant increase in explicit transmission prices in final costs," Aguirre points out.
