Aneel postpones the decision on the request for renewal of the Enel Ceará concession | Businesses

The request was presented after the rapporteur of the process, director Fernando Mosna, voted not to recommend the early extension of the company’s concession contract. The distributor did not respect the efficiency criterion of continuity of supply and therefore did not meet the requirements set out in a government decree establishing the renewal guidelines.

According to the analyzes of the technical field of the regulatory agency, the company did not comply with one of the indicators related to the continuity of electricity supply for three consecutive years, during the periods 2020, 2021 and 2022.

As an alternative, the company presented a results plan to the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME). This possibility is provided for in the decree itself which deals with the rules for renewal and constitutes a way forward for cases in which the distributor does not meet the criteria required to extend the contract.

The decree determines that in the event of non-compliance with the continuity criterion, the company can propose within thirty days a plan including at least actions and investments to achieve the indicator. Enel CE’s plan was approved by the MME in October this year.

The postponement could, however, make it possible to renew the company’s concession, according to sources who explained to Value. With the process pushed back to 2026, the years taken into account in the evaluation of the indicators also change, which could give rise to a new technical analysis, this time without reservations or notes of non-compliance with the criteria of the decree.

In fact, by transferring the year of the possible renewal recommendation to 2026, the five-year period analyzed is from 2021 to 2025. In this five-year interval, according to the decree, the company cannot fail to respect the indicators for three consecutive years. It is therefore possible that next year, when the subject returns to the board of directors, a new evaluation of the indicators will be requested, considering the three-year period from 2023 to 2025.

In a presentation during a discussion on the process, the company representative, Hugo Lamin, affirmed that Enel Ceará currently meets the necessary conditions to proceed with the extension of the concession contract.

The representative highlighted that the MME technical note indicates that the company had a history of non-compliance with the indicator from 2020 to 2022, but reversed the situation from 2023. In addition, the plan presented by the company presents measures with lasting and permanent impact, with the potential to guarantee compliance with regulatory limits in 2025.

According to the data presented by the company representative, the DEC regulatory limits, which measure the duration of service interruption episodes, were respected in 2023 and 2024, and are expected to remain within the limits of what is allowed at the end of this year, taking into account the partial values ​​obtained until October of this year, the most recent data available to date.