Socio-economic segmentation of electricity end-users: Salta's tariff policy for 2022

Abstract

Energy services are considered basic for homes from the point of view of the human right to adequate housing (art. 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). At the beginning of 2022, Argentina announced a debt refinancing agreement with the IMF, which established the removal of subsidies for these services. At the beginning of April, the Undersecretary of Energy Planning of the Nation issued a technical report anticipating a "tariff segmentation", and two weeks later, Salta was the first jurisdiction to apply said criteria to regulate the invoices issued by the provincial distributor. This article characterizes the Wholesale Electricity Market, contextualizes the tariff policy and specifically analyzes the implementation of segmentation in Salta. To do this, public documents and interviews conducted for this research with key actors are analyzed. Finally, some considerations on this implementation and the effects it could have in the medium and long term are presented.