Free electricity for low-income people can be costly for solar panel owners

Provisional measure (MP) 1,300/2025, issued in June by the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and under analysis by the Chamber of Deputies this Wednesday (17), brings a device that generates legal uncertainty and can increase costs for consumers who generate their own energy through solar panels.

This involves the inclusion of paragraph 10 in article 3 of Law 9,427/1996, which establishes that the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel) may establish criteria for which the application of a series of tariff modalities will be mandatory.

MP 1,300 became best known for guaranteeing free electricity bills for families earning up to half the minimum wage per person and with consumption of up to 80 kWh/month, which should benefit up to 60 million consumers.

The Brazilian Association of Photovoltaic Solar Energy (Absolar) warns, however, that, at the same time, the initiative gives Aneel a blank check to establish a fixed charge in addition to that proportional to consumption – the so-called binomial tariffs.

This, according to the entity, creates uncertainty for consumers regarding their energy costs and also regarding the return on investment for those who generate their own energy through solar panels. The change would be fraught with "enormous legal uncertainty for all those who continued their investments based on Law No. 14,300/2022," the so-called legal framework for distributed generation.

"By imposing a tariff model without consumer consent, it creates space for unbalanced, disadvantageous, more onerous and unpredictable tariff structures, directly detrimental to users, who would have no way of planning to optimize their consumption costs, as they would always be subject to involuntary tariff changes that could be imposed by the regulator," says Bárbara Rubim, vice president of distributed generation at Absolar.

“In practice, this creates instability for these consumers in their decisions about the supply modality adopted, as they would have no means of foreseeing and considering, in their decisions about the supply modality adopted, which is the most advantageous among all possible ones for their consumption profile, in the present and in the future”, he adds.

The provision questioned by the association was already in the original text of the provisional measure, signed by Lula and the Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira. In the joint committee of the National Congress, the rapporteur for the matter, Congressman Fernando Coelho Filho (União-PE), maintained the wording in his opinion.

The deadline for Congress to convert the MP into law, already extended, would expire this Wednesday (17) at the risk of losing its validity. Scheduled for analysis by the Chamber's plenary on Tuesday (16), it ended up being postponed due to the vote on the so-called Immunity PEC .

During the discussion of the text, party leaders announced an agreement to separately approve the section of the MP that establishes free electricity bills for low-income families, transplanting the rest of the text to be discussed in another MP, 1,304, which can be voted on by parliamentarians until November 7.

In Bárbara's view, the current public policy within the legal framework for distributed generation, which has been widely debated by society and the National Congress and approved only three years ago, cannot be dismantled. "We must ensure that tariff modernization continues to occur in a dialogued, transparent manner, and without harmful retroactive effects," she says.

“By allowing the unilateral imposition of tariff modalities, without clear and objective regulation, this authorization to Aneel disproportionately expands the regulator's powers, generating a level of regulatory uncertainty incompatible with the attractiveness of new investments.”