Aneel rejects Enel's appeal and maintains process that could revoke concession in SP

The board followed the vote of director and rapporteur Fernando Mosna, who concluded that the company was unable to overturn the reasons alleged by the agency to open, in April, the procedure that could end with the request for revocation.

This Tuesday's decision, therefore, does not mean that Enel lost its contract. What the board did was reject an attempt to go back a step and cancel the opening of the process. As a result, Aneel continues to process the procedure that could recommend the expiration of the contract to the Ministry of Mines and Energy.

The final say on the loss of the concession rests with the ministry. Minister Alexandre Silveira has already publicly demanded the progress of the process at the agency, being in favor of the revocation.

This second process is reported by director Agnes Maria de Aragão da Costa. Last Friday (7), Agnes informed Enel that the process was closed and gave the company ten days to present its final arguments, which ends on August 18. This manifestation is one of the last steps before the rapporteur prepares her vote on the expiry.

The origin of the case lies in the successive blackouts that occurred in São Paulo and the assessment that Enel was unable to correct structural problems in emergency assistance and in reestablishing energy supply after major storms. The company denies and questions the calculations made by the agency.

When commenting on his vote, Sandoval de Araújo Feitosa Neto, general director of Aneel, said that "there is no witch hunt" for the company, nor "alarmist speech" in relation to the decision, providing ample space for the company's defense.

Enel has been the target of a series of fines in recent years, with constant monitoring by the agency over measures taken to resolve problems, such as the delay in restoring power outages.

The biggest test came on December 10, 2025, when a severe weather event hit São Paulo. In one day, around 4.2 million homes and businesses suffered a power cut, equivalent to approximately 52% of Enel SP's customer base. At the time of greatest impact, around 2 million were simultaneously without supply.

Aneel's inspection analyzed the distributor's response and concluded that the problems that had motivated a subpoena in 2024 were still present.

In March 2026, the agency said that the measures presented by Enel "were not sufficient to remedy the failure to provide the service" nor to structurally correct the problems that had given rise to the process.

Aneel identified problems in the number and distribution of teams during the crisis, vehicles used, service productivity, contingency plan and even the capacity of the company's operations center to process incidents.

One of the data highlighted by the inspection shows that, on December 11, 2025, 60% of the staff mobilized by Enel were working during business hours, while only 10% of the staff remained in the field during the early hours of the morning.

There was also a saturation of the Enel Distribution Operation Center. Mosna's vote reports that the time for the initial dispatch of some incidents reached, in the most critical cases, 45 hours.

The main thesis presented by Enel in its appeal was precisely a discussion about an indicator to measure reconnections. When monitoring the Recovery Plan, Aneel used as one of its references the restoration of at least 80% of consumer units within 24 hours during major events. Enel maintained that the April decision mixed two different ways of calculating this index.

According to the company, Aneel considered that 67% of consumers had their supply restored within the period, using the so-called "simultaneous peak" as a reference. Enel argued that, if another methodology mentioned in the process was applied, based on the total number of consumers reached throughout the event, the result would be 80.2%, that is, the company would have exceeded, even by two tenths, the 80% reference.

The concessionaire used this difference to claim that there was an internal contradiction in the April decision and that the process should be annulled.

Mosna, however, stated that the methodology used by the inspection was applied continuously throughout the process. Even if the 80.2% percentage defended by Enel were accepted, he stated that the result would not be enough to overturn the decision to open the process.

This is because, according to the rapporteur, the distributor's performance was considered inadequate on other fronts, such as team scale, productivity, service delays and prolonged interruptions. The Federal Attorney's Office together with Aneel reached the same conclusion.

Enel even claimed that it was receiving harsher treatment than other distributors. The company stated that other companies with similar or even worse indicators did not have open expiry processes.

Mosna said that the isolated comparison is not valid because Enel's situation brings together a sequence of episodes with a history of failures, unsuccessful results plans, fines, subpoenas and the persistence of structural problems.

The vote records that Enel accumulated more than R$320 million in fines and went through nine results plans, of which seven were considered unsatisfactory. This means a failure rate of 78%.

Among the punishments highlighted are a fine of R$16.2 million in 2021, another of R$95.9 million in 2022 and one of R$165.8 million after the blackout in November 2023. The agency states that the penalties were increasing, but failed to produce the expected improvement in the service.

Aneel also recorded that R$261 million in fines had not been paid so far by the concession