Mexico multiplies transmission, distribution fees for private generators

Mexico’s state-owned power company CFE has announced hikes of between 428% and 811% for high-, medium- and low- voltage fees paid by certain private generators for the use of public transmission and distribution lines.

The announcement comes just a day after company officials railed against what they called a “black market” of private sector exploitation of regulatory rules that has allegedly cost the company some 22.8bn pesos (US$1.05bn) over the last three years. 

The CFE's legacy contracts intermediation subsidiary published the new portage fees on Wednesday in the federal gazette, adding the fine print to the May 28 announcement from energy regulator CRE that rates would increase to private generators that have a self-supply contract awarded before the 2013-2014 energy reforms, which are known as legacy contracts. 

As stated in the gazette, the high-voltage transmission fee will increase from 0.049 pesos per kWh to 0.2785/kWh, with the medium-voltage rate climbing to 0.2586 pesos/kWh, raises of 468% and 428%, respectively. 

The low-voltage rate, meanwhile, was hiked by some 811% to 0.8928 pesos/kWh from 0.09799 pesos/kWh. 

The text of the announcement on Wednesday does not disclose when these new rates will come into effect. 

On Tuesday, CFE’s chief of corporate communication, Luis Bravo Navarro, and Mario Morales, director of CFE legacy contract intermediation, targeted these legacy contracts in a virtual press conference, saying the company stood to lose close to 8bn pesos to legacy contracts in 2020 alone under the previous rates.

This latest move stands to attract a new round of legal protests from the industry to add to existing processes against rules introduced late last year on new definitions for clean energy certificates (CELs), as well as legal challenges to the energy ministry (Sener) and grid operator’s (Cenace) “reliability policy”, halting pre-operative testing on 19 solar and wind projects during the COVID-19 crisis.