In September, Chile begins a new phase of discussion on its electricity regulation, and Empresas Eléctricas AG will seek to implement a fundamental change: replacing the logic of reacting to the needs of distribution with a scheme that allows for anticipating investments and preparing the networks decades in advance .
The proposal comes as the Ministry of Energy begins discussions to modernize regulations whose core structure dates back to 1982. The government announced that the process will focus on distribution and related transmission matters, with the intention of completing the technical work by December and subsequently moving forward with the legislative process.
“Today we continue to pay a theoretical company and then ask the real company to face real problems and costs. That no longer works,” said Juan Meriches, CEO of Empresas Eléctricas AG, in an interview with Energía Estratégica .
The questioning doesn't come solely from the private sector. In March, the Expert Committee for the Review of the Regulatory System of the Electricity Sector , convened by the Ministry of Energy, concluded that the design based on an “efficient model company” requires modifications to incorporate new technologies, adapt to changes in consumption and generation, and address greater risks stemming from natural disasters. Among its recommendations was precisely to modify the remuneration model to recognize investment plans and introduce incentives for strengthening the grid.
In that sense, for Meriches, the reform should allow investments to be recognized before the infrastructure reaches its limits.
“We can’t wait until a substation is congested or thousands of connection requests appear before we start to react,” he said. His proposal is to incorporate network planning with 20- or 30-year horizons, along with mechanisms to recognize efficient investments and demand results in quality and resilience.
The discussion has already taken its first regulatory step. Law 21.833 , published on July 31, 2026, under the name “Let’s Get the Accounts in Order,” amended the General Law of Electrical Services and empowered the Ministry of Energy to call upon distributors to submit investment plans for works that improve the quality of service , the remuneration for which may be recognized later in the tariff processes.
This is the mechanism that Meriches believes needs to be made permanent. The authority itself presented it as a response to a previous limitation: until now, there was no clear instrument for recognizing additional investments aimed at reinforcing the networks before they were strictly necessary to maintain supply.
Quality of service: Chile is still far from the goal
The pressure to increase investments is also supported by continuity indicators.
The Ministry of Energy's 2026-2030 Energy Roadmap indicates that Chile recorded an average of 15.2 hours of power outages per customer in 2025, not including force majeure , while public policy aims to reduce that figure to around four hours by 2035. The same document acknowledges a structural gap in security and resilience, especially in rural and low-voltage distribution networks.
Previous years also showed significant exposure to extreme events. According to statistics from the Superintendency of Electricity and Fuels (SEC) , the national SAIDI reached 27.6 hours in 2024 , compared to 13.58 hours in 2023, a jump mainly explained by the interruptions associated with force majeure recorded that year.
In that scenario, Meriches maintains that the companies associated with Empresas Eléctricas invested more than US$2.3 billion during the last five years , although he considers that volume insufficient in the face of the new demands.
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The challenge is not unique to Chile. The International Energy Agency currently estimates that global annual investment in grids will need to grow by about 50% by 2030, from approximately US$400 billion today , due to increased electricity demand, renewables, energy storage, and new loads.
Hundreds of MW of generation capacity are already within the grids
The need to modify the regulation is also related to what is beginning to happen downstream of the system.
Small Distributed Generation Facilities (PMGD) exceeded 3800 MW installed, while GD under the net billing scheme reached 513 MW in June, distributed among almost 43,000 installations
Furthermore, the new official roadmap proposes to increase net-billing capacity to 1 GW by 2030 .
For Electric Companies, these resources —along with batteries, electromobility and demand management— should no longer be considered accessory elements and should begin to form part of the planning, operation and pricing of distribution .
“We are going to have more and more distributed generation, batteries, electric vehicles and users who not only consume, but can also inject energy or manage when they consume it,” Meriches explained.
The transformation is already reflected in the scale that energy storage has reached. As of July 2026, Chile had 2,655 MW and 11,250 MWh of BESS (Basic Energy Storage System) in operation, in addition to 3,151 MW and 14,698 MWh undergoing testing. Another 5,040 MW and 21,721 MWh were under construction, according to the latest ACERA report. This volume underscores the need for regulations and grids to be able to absorb increasingly flexible resources and more complex operations.
In this new scenario, Empresas Eléctricas proposes that distributors evolve into more active operators of their networks, with real-time monitoring and the ability to coordinate distributed resources, but without closing the market to third parties. Meriches identifies room for aggregators and other flexibility service providers , under competitive conditions, open access, and grid neutrality.
Smart meters: the issue that's back in the discussion
Digitization will be another subject that will likely return to the legislative debate.
Chile had planned to install smart meters for virtually all electricity customers: in 2019, regulations aimed to achieve close to 100% coverage by 2025 , across a then-estimated population of around 6.5 million users. However, controversy surrounding equipment ownership, financing, and the actual benefit to consumers led to the decision that same year to make the replacement voluntary.
Seven years later, the Committee of Experts again included the technology among its recommendations, although now through pilot projects adapted to different types of customers and areas , along with a tariff modernization that allows consumption to be shifted to times when the system has greater flexibility.
Meriches agrees with a gradual rollout and argues that advanced metering would be necessary to detect outages, perform remote operations and enable differentiated tariffs, for example to shift electric vehicle charging to lower-cost periods.