by: Norma Villalobos
Through Legislative Decree No. 146, the Legislative Assembly recently approved reforms to the General Electricity Law. The most relevant aspects of the approved reforms are the following:
- The activities of generation, transmission, distribution, and commercialization of electric energy are recognized as public services, and the entities that develop such activities must be of public, mixed, or private nature, regardless of their degree of autonomy or incorporation regime.
- The definition of concession for the exploitation of a hydraulic or geothermal resource is modified, in the sense that the requirement of granting a concession by the Legislative Assembly will no longer apply to public entities, to the Comisión Ejecutiva Hidroeléctrica del Río Lempa (CEL), nor to the mercantile companies resulting from the restructuring process of CEL or in which CEL has majority participation and director control.
- It is added as sources of an obligation of the operators, in addition to one of the rendering services or making supplies other than those contained in the referred Law and its contracts, those derived from the regulations, agreements, technical norms, energy policy, and resolutions of the General Superintendence of Electricity and Telecommunications (SIGET), and of the public entity that has the steering functions of the sector.
- Two new articles are added to the Law called 10-A and 10-B, the first one establishes that the remuneration of fixed and investment costs will be made through the recognition of the firm capacity that each of the generating units effectively contributed to the power system during the year to be recognized; the second one establishes that the firm capacity referred to in Article 10-A will be determined in a regulatory manner for each type of resource and it must be representative of the capacity that was available for the power system during the period subject to recognition.
- Article 78 of the Law is amended to provide that distribution network operators acting as marketers in the geographic area where their networks are located must submit annually to SIGET for its approval, not one, but one or more tariff sheets containing the prices and conditions for the supply of electric energy according to the voltage level, seasonality and hourly distribution of its use, or associated to the contracts resulting from the free competition processes to supply specific demands, whose characteristics, requirements, treatment and form of recognition of any existing financial mismatch will be defined in the regulations of the Law.
- Article 79 is amended to establish the criteria for establishing the prices included in the tariff schedules referred to in Article 78.
The amendments approved by the Legislative Assembly are already in effect and were published in the Official Gazette No. 184 Volume No. 432 dated September 28, 2021.