More than 5 thousand retail consumers have already started migrating to the free market

More than 5,3 consumers from Group A have already terminated their contracts with distributors and are preparing to migrate to the free market in 2024. Of this total, 2.195 units will begin operating in January next year, when the new ones come into effect. rules of MME Normative Ordinance nº 50/22.

The data are contained in Technical Note No. 76/23 prepared by ANEEL (National Electric Energy Agency) and which are intended to support a discussion on improving energy retail rules in Brazil.

“Based on the migration information forwarded by the distributors for the reference date 31/07/2023, via the Conect systemANEEL, 5301 consumers were identified with CCER (Regulated Energy Purchase Contract) reported with migration expected in 2024. Detailing the annual information month by month, we identified the highest incidence of migration in the month of January 2024, in the volume of 2195 consumer units and, in the month of July 2024 in the volume of 937 consumer units, as can be seen in Figure 3”, says the text.

The current rule only authorizes consumers with a load equal to or greater than 500 kW to participate in the free market (alone or in shared load). However, from January onwards, all high voltage consumers will be able to migrate to the free energy market, if they wish, regardless of the volume of energy consumed, as long as they are represented by a retail supplier.

The movement is part of the process of opening the ACL (Free Contracting Environment), which will allow more consumers to choose their own energy supplier. The CCEE (Electric Energy Trading Chamber) estimates that at least 72 thousand Group A consumers will be able to migrate to the free market from next year.

The next step in ANEEL will be to open a public consultation on retail marketing, where market agents will have the opportunity to contribute to the improvement of the standard. The expectation is that the process will be completed by December of this year, so that the new standard will come into effect in January 2024.

What does the technical note say

Group A consumers will only be able to migrate to the free market under the representation of a retail supplier. He will be responsible for presenting all of his represented information to the CCEE.

In order to facilitate comparability of the essential elements of energy contracts, retail traders must display on their electronic portal, at least, a standard annual contract model, providing for volume distribution, seasonalization and flat modulation.

The CCEE will act as a centralizer of all information related to the migration of consumers to the ACL represented by retail agents. The Chamber will also be responsible for receiving consumption measurement data from the respective retail agents. ANEEL did not identify the need to change the regulation regarding the technical requirements associated with measuring and sending data.

“With the measurement data from these consumer units, it will be up to CCEE, knowing the relationship between each consumer and their respective retail agent, to aggregate the loads of each retail agent, so that a single load information per agent is introduced in the accounting process. retailer, and can be segregated, non-exhaustively, by submarket and type of energy, to be defined according to the asset registration and modeling process”, says the technical note.

In a simplified way, the process of aggregating and allocating consumer load to the respective retail representatives would be carried out as follows:

1) The distributor makes consumer measurement data available to CCEE;
2) CCEE receives the measurement data and assigns each consumer's load to the respective retail agent;
3) CCEE aggregates the loads assigned to each retail agent; It is.
4) CCEE counts the sum of each retail agent's load.

Once the Group A consumer migrates to the free market, he will only be able to return to the regulated market as long as he informs the concessionaire of his desire 5 years in advance.