'Today the self-consumption project is floating as a free client'

PRESS RELEASE from Acen

April 4, 2024

This is a machine translation of the original release, issued in Spanish

The marketing challenges for 2024 were the topic of the dialogue organized by ACEN where the new business leaders in this field participated. Although they agree that the probable lowering of the power limit is a super challenge, there are also other more pedestrian ones that, according to the majority, involve an effective exchange between the different market agents, definitions from the electrical authority and a chain of healthy payments.

However, our focus is also on internal challenges, as Teresa Company, Country Manager Chile at Factor Luz, says, “reinvent, make flexible and strengthen the value proposition, that is, we have to go beyond supplying energy, we have to "We have to become companies that offer services that can be adjusted to the client's needs and that are very attractive."

He also highlighted the power of the client through the use of technology that gives him “greater control of his energy”, however, from the side of demand, the guest at the dialogue Juan Sebastián Jara, Co-founder at Match Energía, He commented that “the payment chain associated with distribution tolls is not over-supervised like the balances of power, energy, and complementary services are” and of course, customers, instead of feeling empowered, are afraid of being disconnected.

On the other hand, Jara demystified the belief that it is not convenient for free customers to have a photovoltaic self-consumption plant and that both solutions can coexist in a good way. In their consulting firm, when analyzing the offers of companies that offer self-consumption to free customers, they realized a weakness in the economic evaluations. “If one graphs how the system assigns the cost overruns associated with the energy market, the technical minimums, the tension items, the stabilized price, that volume of money is distributed more than 90% in hours and days. So those companies that offer those types of services have to add those costs in their offer and the stabilized price as we have seen, which takes more than 50% of the SEN charges, including complementary services, you have at least 11 dollars per mega watt more and in some months it reaches up to 15 dollars. With that, today the self-consumption project is floating as a free customer.”

What does not float, as Miguel Iglesias, CEO at Energyasset, mentioned, are the clients who pay late or simply stop paying, "we have to influence a little more in the control of the administration of the clients to suspend the supply or other pressures to take care of the payment chain.”

According to the conversation, it is clear that time must also be invested in “educating” clients who are often in the opacity of electrical knowledge, and this includes “helping them understand and understand the problems and regulatory changes that they are experiencing and how "They are going to affect them, such as the future law of stabilization of electricity rates or the requalification of dedicated lines that is causing great uncertainty in free distribution clients," commented Mauricio Utreras, Development and New Business Manager at Roda Energía.

As a result of the possible decrease in power, Utreras added that “we will be facing a challenge very different from what we know. We are talking about doubling the number of current clients with the potential to be free clients. Refrigerators, workshops or small industries that will seek support from an energy point of view in order to be more competitive."

Thus abandoning past visions, marketers agree that the next thing is to “start working with a client portfolio, with a portfolio of demands,” according to Company.

In general, Jara added, this type of “small” client works a shift from 8 to 6 and rarely has a couple of exceptional hours or at most 2 shifts. “The challenge of night supply is not relevant to the equation. Considering the oversupply of daytime energy, the client will receive offers and the rates will be very competitive.”

There are free clients who have a connected power of 500 kW but in energy consumption they are similar to some with 300 kW and even so they receive an average of 15 offers, which is a complete overview of the market of participants who actively go for those free clients, according to Jara.

Another myth surrounding these “small” clients, highlighted by the moderator and executive secretary of ACEN, Eduardo Andrade, is that they could be unprotected because they would be unsophisticated clients and, therefore, they could be subject to clauses or prices and costs higher than the that they would have in the regulated market. On this issue, Utreras sees an opportunity for the public sector that can help with the transparency of this market, “simplify the contract models, in addition to making the average SEN market prices transparent for distribution and for free clients, providing this information disaggregated. by type of client to understand well what prices these clients can really access so that false expectations are not generated.”

According to Iglesias, the authority could also “accelerate the regulations so that storage projects can enter to leave dependence on diesel and coal and achieve energy independence with our own capabilities, that is, with our sun, with our batteries, in our system with our robust lines.”