Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Photo: presidencia.gob.mx

By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) just dealt what might be the final blow to the nation’s energy reform bill, implemented in 2013 by former President Enrique Peña Nieto.

On Friday, Oct. 1, he sent this latest electricity reform initiative to Congress, a law which would restrict control of the sector to the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), eliminating all autonomous regulators, such as the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) and the National Hydrocarbon Commission Nacional (CNH).

The new initiative would grant the CFE the power to set rates for transmission and distribution networks, as well as those for end users.

It also establishes that the National Center for Energy Control (Cenace) will be reincorporated to the Secretariat of Energy (Sener) and with it, the interconnection of all energy producers and providers.

The presidential bill likewise proposes the cancellation of clean energy certificates for public and private generators, arguing that they have become a “business.”

Currently, private companies that supply energy must comply with a percentage of electrical energy coming from clean energy and it is the CRE that issues those certifications.

Also under the new law, current electricity contracts and generation permits for private companies would be canceled, including independent producers, long-term auction plants and power plants constructed as of the 2013 energy reform.

The initiative likewise goes after individual self-supply energy companies, 239 private monopolies with 77,767 partners in total, which are currently granted insured sales of their energy, calling them “blatantly illegal mechanisms.”

In addition, all pending requests from private parties for electricity generation would be canceled.

In essence, the president’s new initiative constitutes a counter-energy reform that seems to ignore the fact that the demand for electricity will continue to grow in coming years.

It also ignores that fact that the CFE, led by Manuel Bartlett, is currently hemorrhaging money and hasn’t the resources to build new plants.

Worse yet, products manufactured with dirty energy will not be allowed to be exported to most countries under current international environmental regulations, which will generate multimillion-dollar losses in Mexico.