Electricity: compensations and reductions for companies to accelerate technical upgrades of electrical system
Milan, February 23, 2009
Italian versionAutomatic compensations and lighter electricity bills will be provided for businesses running on medium-voltage power who carry out a technical upgrade of their systems, thus allowing greater system stability and reliability.
The announcement was made by the Regulatory Authority for Electricity and Gas of Italy through an information campaign to aware medium-voltage customers (businesses typically powered with 15,000 or 20,000 Volts) about the importance of prompt technical upgrades of their electrical systems. The purpose is to support an overall development of system quality and thus benefit all consumers (including domestic).
Business that provide regular maintenance or install automatic devices, informing their power distributors of such measures, will see concrete advantages, even in economic terms. These include, in particular, automatic compensations credited directly in their electricity bills in case of too many short or long outages, and the elimination of a particular tariff component (CTS), which will no longer be included in the bill.
Moreover, all medium-voltage customers will have access to customized information on the Internet websites of their electricity distributors.
The Resolution (ARG/elt 17/09) is published on the website www.autorita.energia.it.
The measure in detail
The technical adjustements of the electrical system will enable each medium-voltage customer to receive automatic compensation if suffering of a high number of long outages (lasting more than 3 minutes) during the year and, starting on the 1st of July 2009, even in case of outages of exceptional length, based on the standards established by the Authority. It will be possible to avoid payment of the tariff component (CTS) (Specific Tariff Charges).
The information system for medium-voltage customers on the progressive improvement of the electrical systems joins the regulatory instruments already adopted towards electricity distributors, which allowed to reduce, over the past eight years, the average length of outages by 70% and the frequency of long outages by 43%.