Daniel Marx, chairman of Edenor, said electricity distribution in Argentina is going through a transition, with concrete progress made and regulatory issues still open. He made the case at the “Deregulation of the Electricity Sector” roundtable of the eighth Fórum Nacional de Energía, which LIDE Argentina held on Thursday, November 5, at the Alvear Icon Hotel in Buenos Aires under the title “Argentina Global Energy 2026.”
“I think we are in a transition process. A long stretch of the road has been covered, but there are still things missing,” the executive said.
The panel, moderated by Nadia Sager, CEO and founder of GEINSA, brought together the three links of the electricity chain. Alongside Marx were Fernando Bonnet, CEO of Central Puerto, one of Argentina’s largest power generators, and Pablo Tarca, general manager of Transener, the high-voltage electricity transmission company. According to its 2024 sustainability report, Edenor is Argentina’s largest electricity distributor by number of customers and by electricity sold: it serves 3.34 million customers across a 4,637 km² concession area covering 20 municipalities in northwestern Greater Buenos Aires and the northwestern part of the City of Buenos Aires.
For Marx, Tariffs Replaced CAMMESA as the Adjustment Variable and Are Again Funding Expansion Plans
Marx described the segment’s starting point in stark terms: “This was a sector that, moreover, in distribution in particular, was coming out of Stalinism in Argentina.” Since then, he explained, several relative prices have been normalized, and the tariff has become the adjustment variable for sustaining the service and investment plans.
“The adjustment variable for the plans, or even to keep the service running at a basic level, is not CAMMESA. It is working with a tariff that also made it possible to make certain expansion plans economically viable,” he said, referring to the Compañía Administradora del Mercado Mayorista Eléctrico (CAMMESA), Argentina’s wholesale electricity market administrator.
Edenor’s current tariff stems from the Five-Year Tariff Review that ENRE, Argentina’s electricity regulator, approved through Resolution 304/2025, published in the Official Gazette on April 30, 2025, with tariff schedules in force since May 1 of that year.
Edenor’s chairman acknowledged that discussions with the regulator are ongoing, on issues ranging from the applicable capital base to the corresponding rate. Even so, he noted that the company has been able to access financing that allowed it to optimize its investment plans. He added that the adjustment covers not only the completion of the transition in the pricing system but also the technological changes that have altered the prices of solar panels and batteries.
Marx Puts Energy Allocation Among Distributors and Tariff Pass-Through on the Agenda
Asked by the moderator about next steps, Marx cited two issues. The first is the energy allocated to each distributor on the path toward deregulation, which, he explained, varies according to the makeup of its customer base and its location. The second is the adaptation of the mechanisms for passing costs through to tariffs, known in the sector as pass-through.
Sager added that the coexistence of national and provincial rules makes those changes more complex to apply. Along the same lines, Bonnet had argued during the panel that work is needed, including with the provinces, for distributors to become players in long-term energy contracting. Central Puerto’s CEO said he had discussed it with Marx “on several occasions.”
The idea of distributors as long-term buyers had already come up in September at the Mendoza Energy Summit, where Bernardo Andrews, CEO of Genneia, cast them as the bridge until mining demand arrives. Genneia is Argentina’s leading renewable energy company.
Edenor Aims to Cut Losses and Studies the Impact of Distributed Generation on Large Users
On how to combine a competitive tariff with quality of supply, Marx pointed to the makeup of the bill. “Bear in mind that, in the bill the user sees, the largest component is generation. Then comes the distribution added value, and transmission is a minor part, and taxes are not minor,” he explained. That is why, he argued, the competitiveness of distribution has to fit with that of the other sectors, “which include the State as well.”
The executive said Edenor is working on three fronts: avoiding outages, speeding up repairs when they occur and reducing technical and non-technical losses, the latter mainly electricity that is consumed but not billed. On non-technical losses, he said a mechanism linked to meters will make it possible to lower costs and gradually bring down the average bill. To minimize outages and repair times, he cited data access and remote repair through digital rings, which he said are already under way.
Marx noted that large users are few within distributors’ portfolios but weigh heavily in billing, adapt faster to market movements and seek on their own to become more efficient. Looking ahead, he identified small-scale generation as the big challenge. “There may be a whole impact, I think, with large users moving to distributed generation and distributed storage, which will change the relative weight of capacity and energy,” he said, adding that the company is studying it.
The moderator offered a figure on that trend. According to Sager, since the regulatory change about 900 of the roughly 6,000 large users served by the country’s distributors have switched to buying in the market, prompted by last winter’s price signal. She also argued that, in the provinces, the toll tariff must properly pay for the value of distribution.
Marx agreed and pointed to the structure of charges: he said work is needed to better differentiate capacity and network costs in what large users pay. He also warned that grid-connected generation will bring challenges in stability and in managing supply and demand in each case.
The supply available to those large users grows on April 1, 2027, when existing thermal and hydroelectric plants will be able to commit up to 60% of their output to contracts, under Resolution 293/2026 of Argentina’s Secretariat of Energy.