The private initiative has opened the door to negotiate the contracts that some companies maintain with the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) and that derive from models established before the 2013 reform.
These contracts, known as legacies, include the figures of Independent Energy Producers (PIEs) and self-supply. Both models have become the main target of attacks by the federal government, considering that they were negotiated under terms that weaken the state company.
“This is not a matter of constitutional reform,” said Carlos Salazar Lomelín, the president of the Business Coordinating Council (CCE), this afternoon in the open parliament on the initiative. The presidential reform has as one of its main points the cancellation of some contracts that the State maintains with several electricity generating companies.
“We should have sat down [to see] how we solve the PIEs, how we solve the self-supplies, how we enter the wholesale market. I think it is still viable to be able to move on solutions and hopefully we can join the how yes, instead of each one putting positions that could seem to be found. This is a matter from our point of view, and I reiterate it again, of costs, how it translates into prices and who is going to put the wool in the future, the investment”, said the maximum representative of the business leadership.
Salazar appeared this Wednesday in the open parliament, after a few weeks ago some deputies criticized his absence at a debate table in which the director of the state company, Manuel Bartlett, participated. The representative of the private sector argued on that occasion that at the last minute they had not allowed him to participate virtually in the debate.
The main argument of the federal government against self-supply companies and Independent Producers is based on the fact that the contracts were agreed with fixed transportation rates. Which, according to what the CFE has defended, has translated into losses for the national company.
The establishment of these fixed rates -indexed to inflation- was taken as a measure to encourage the construction of new generation capacity and transport infrastructure, at a time when the state company needed to guarantee meeting the demand of industrial clients. The CFE agreed to establish convenient rates for the private sector, in exchange for it disbursing its capital for the construction of infrastructure that would later be donated to the State.
But almost 30 years after the first contracts of this type were granted, self-supply and Independent Power Producers are shaping up to become the currency of negotiation between the business sector and the federal government. Salazar Lomelí has hinted this afternoon that the private companies would be willing to negotiate the payments for transportation that they make to the national electricity company.
“Yes, we can sit down at a table and start with different positions trying to find a solution. It is a problem of costs and tariffs, it is not a problem of legal reforms and much less of leading to a constitutional change, something that could be perfectly arranged between the participants and economic agents of a sector as important as electricity,” he said in a statement. discussion that lasted for about five hours.
During the six-year term, the federal government and the private initiative have already made negotiations on critical issues in the energy sector and contracts derived from the past six-year term. In 2019, during the first months of the six-year term, the CFE held a negotiating table with the business sector regarding six contracts for the construction of gas pipelines, which were considered by President López Obrador as “leonines”.
“If the Federal Commission had sat down with the private parties, we would have reached solutions as we did with other cases at other times,” Salazar said this afternoon.
“All the discussion I hear here is that the rates are not adequate and that it has not been collected. We want to take a commercial problem of defining rates and prices to a constitutional change. Deputies, I believe that in this we must have a lot of responsibility, because we Mexicans do not deserve another constitutional change when we can sit at the table, in discussions that are not easy.
