The works must be financed by the users, according to their demand. Comments can be submitted until Monday.
Expansion of transmission system would open dispute with large electricity consumers
(Diaro Financiero) Mining companies are analyzing with concern the expansion plan currently being promoted by the government, through the National Energy Commission, which seeks to develop a series of projects including the construction of a new power transmission line parallel to the one currently being built at Cardones-Polpaico.
The investments for these works consider a disbursement of more than US$ 3,000 million, an amount that, as defined in the transmission law, is transferred to the account of all users based on their demand. Thus, for example, industrial and mining companies would be responsible for paying for a large part of the investments, since the latter account for 38% of the demand.
The Mining Council, the trade union that groups the large corporations, assured that they have been following the issue closely, mainly the energy commission led by Francisco Danitz, from Codelco, and Anna Gretchina, from Antofagasta Minerals.
[Expansión de la transmisión abre nuevas oportunidades a pymes de ingeniería]
A new meeting of this committee is expected to be held tomorrow. The urgency lies in the fact that the deadlines for submitting observations expire on Monday, ten working days after their presentation, which has also generated discomfort, since the industry considers that the time to present the corresponding studies is too short.
After this, the CNE has 30 days to analyze these observations and issue a response through the Final Technical Report. If the observations are not accepted, the complainants may present their discrepancies to the Panel of Experts, as the last instance available, a body that settles disputes in the sector.
If this were to happen, it would not be the first time that the mining companies have turned to this entity. This already happened in 2015, with the Trunk Transmission Study, which had observations from Escondida, Collahuasi and Anglo American, the latter two also filed objections against the Interconnection in 2013.
Consultancy firm Systep points out that the storage investments included in the proposal could also be questioned. Rodrigo Jiménez, general manager, says that “it is not clear that this investment is a transmission element whose purpose is to allow the development of generation or to avoid new transmission works. It seems that the objective is to lower operating costs with systems that contribute energy to the grid, which is a role of the generation segment that should take place in a context of a competitive market between private parties, and not necessarily through an investment that consumers are obliged to finance”.
