The thirteenth transitory article empowers Chile's National Energy Commission (CNE) to develop, on a single occasion and no later than December 2027, a mechanism to reduce the price of supply to regulated customers. In exchange for amending the price, the term and conditions of one or more contracts are to be revisited. All of this operates under three principles —legal certainty, voluntary participation and economic efficiency— that a regulation still has to spell out.
In principle, there is only one silver bullet. The question is what that regulation has to say for the instrument to work. To get a sense of it, we built a model of the entire portfolio of regulated supply contracts —66 contracts, 41,173 GWh per year— to try to understand its effects. What follows are four things the numbers say, and that are worth settling before sitting down to negotiate rather than afterwards.
First: the renegotiation is about twenty contracts
The regulated portfolio looks large and diverse, but for the purposes of this mechanism it is not. A single auction —SIC 2013/03— accounts for 20 contracts, 11,955 GWh per year and 30% of the committed energy, at an average price of 135.6 USD/MWh indexed to June 2026. Within that block, two contracts are almost everything: Engie with 5,040 GWh per year and Central El Campesino, of Generadora Metropolitana, with 4,000. Behind them come Cerro Dominador with 950 and Acciona with 600.
Exclude that auction and the mechanism all but disappears. Other contracts —for instance Enel's CHL 2010/01, 1,485 GWh per year at 117.9 USD/MWh— expire in December 2027. Renegotiating a contract with months left is not lowering a price: it is buying new years.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable but clear: a mechanism that fails to bring Engie and Generadora Metropolitana to the table is not worth the regulatory cost of having tried. A set of contracts awarded through public auctions will have been reopened in order to move the customer's bill by a margin the next tariff-setting round absorbs without breaking a sweat.
Second: the month you measure decides who qualifies
Any rule of this kind needs a moment at which to measure. It looks like an administrative detail. It clearly is not.
June 2026 is not just any month. Brent went from 62.7 USD per barrel in December 2025 to a peak of 122.3 in April, and closed August at 90.4. Coal has risen 33% in seven months and is still climbing. Against the 2024-2025 average, coal is 19% higher, Brent 14% and natural gas 9%. These are increases the international context explains, and that nobody can guarantee are permanent.
The effect on the indexed price would seem minor, but it is not: the portfolio is 81% CPI. The two largest blocks carry LNG indexation of 12% and 38% respectively.
Third: voluntary participation has a price, and the price is term
The article says voluntary, and that means the supplier can say no. There is already some history on this point.
The model builds that willingness in as an explicit condition: the supplier accepts only if, in present value, what it gains over the extension years exceeds what it loses from the discount over its remaining term. Evidently, without an extension of term, it is hard for any of the candidates to accept.
That is where a deeper problem seems to lie. The logical position is that the supplier accepts only if the negotiated price is at least what it would obtain by placing that energy on expiry (which is a heroic assumption), and the customer gains from the extension only if the opposite holds.
In a way it echoes what was already discussed in 2025:
While it could have a positive effect in the short term, it would imply an increase in prices for regulated customers over the medium and long term.
Fourth: the other half of the argument, still off the table
There is a question this analysis cannot answer and that the mechanism cannot ignore. The SIC 2013/03 contracts were awarded in 2013, began supplying between 2016 and 2019, and by January 2027 have 58% of their term already served. They were bid in a world different from the one that ended up happening.
Since then, several things have eroded the value of those contracts for whoever took them on: over-contracting by the distribution companies relative to the demand that actually materialised, and a set of system costs —the so-called side payments— that have risen consistently and that the contract did not anticipate.
A single shot
The power granted by the thirteenth transitory article is, supposedly, for one time only. That makes it valuable and fragile at once: if it is spent on a deal that lowers the bill for six years and raises it for the following five, there will be no second chance to correct it, and the cost will not only be tariff-related. Confidence that a contract awarded through a public auction will be honoured is an asset of the system, and it is the asset that pays for the next auction.
Renegotiating is defensible. Renegotiating without having defined where the price is measured, how success is measured and how much term one is willing to hand over, is not.