BRAZIL: Electricity Tariff Should Incorporate Demand Changes, Says Regulator

(RTTNews) - Brazil should incorporate variations in power demand to the electricity price in the future, in spite of the near-term obstacles to that kind of change, said the director of the power sector regulator Aneel, José Jurhosa Junior.

"If this is the case, we will have to change all the power meters, but I believe that this is the future of the country," he said.

"You have to take the risk out of the distributor and pass it on to the marketer, and then the customer can choose," Jurhosa said. "We have to create conditions so that in the future the consumer can generate his energy."

Meanwhile, the Empresa de Pesquisa Energética's chairman, Luiz Barroso, noted that before implementing the so-called binomial rate - which would mix the power consumption and charges related to power demand - it would be important to prepare the regulation for the new technologies.

In his opinion, however, it would not be necessary to change the power meters to incorporate variations in power demand to the electricity price, once information on consumption peaks would be enough.