Guadalajara, Jalisco. Although the Congress of the Union rejected the electricity reform of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in which the debate focused on the interference of the public and private sectors, the real risk for the states is that there is no government investment plan to increase the power transmission and distribution infrastructure in the country.
This was warned by the director of the Jalisco State Energy Agency (AEEJ), Bernardo Macklis, who told El Economista that currently, the installed capacity allows supplying 70% of the energy demand in the state of Jalisco, but there are companies that they cannot increase investments in production processes because there is no capacity to supply them with energy.
“We do not have the capacity in the country, in the national electrical system, to transmit energy, we are stuck, and there is no real plan to increase the capacity of our infrastructure,” he stressed.
According to Macklis, regardless of the type of energy that is generated, the underlying problem is that there is no infrastructure to distribute it to the states of the national territory.
Only in the case of Jalisco, he said, about 30 renewable energy generation projects remain on standby, with a joint investment of around 3,000 million dollars, because there is no infrastructure to transmit energy and, therefore, there is no they can be incorporated into the system, despite the fact that they already had permission from the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE).
The state official explained that based on the current law, the National Center for Energy Control (Cenace) requires strong investments from generating companies to create transmission lines, which causes said generation projects to cease to be profitable and for that reason they remain detained.
“Mainly they are photovoltaic solar power generation projects that are mostly located in Los Altos de Jalisco,” said Macklis.
Annually, the annual energy demand in Jalisco is between 15 and 18 terawatts.
The director of the AEEJ anticipated that in the coming months or even years, the fight in court will continue “if there is no other attempt in the current federal legislature to modify the law of the electricity industry.”
state law
Although the last local Legislature worked on an initiative for Jalisco to have its own energy law, the director of the AEEJ explained that “while transmission and distribution is an exclusive issue of the Federation, it is very difficult for the states to have greater interference ”.
However, he said, there is an area of opportunity in the topic of micro networks; that is, to develop state or regional electrical systems totally independent of the national system whose legal structure continues to be developed by the state of Jalisco.