University of California Energy Institute

PWP-024

Implementing Open Access: with Special Emphasisi on Chile's Experience

Pablo Spiller (U.C. Berkeley)

Chile's reforms of the electricity sector are pathbreaking: elimination of monopoly franchise, deregulation of generation and of new generation investments, introduction of direct access for large users, break-up of vertically integrated utilities, centralized dispatch undertaken by a private entity, and the introduction of an innovative regulatory system based on marginal cost price and on the role of a putative efficient firm. After 15 years of reforms, it is time to ask whether it is possible to improve upon a system that is, quite clearly, among the most efficient and sophisticated in the world. In PWP-024, Spiller has two main purposes: first, to present the main shortcomings in Chile's transmission pricing policy and possible solutions; second, to show that this problem may not have a global optimal solution.