Before beginning his six-year term, President López Obrador announced that he would not make constitutional reforms during his first three years in office. In particular, he assured that he would not change the legal framework of the energy sector, of which he would make an evaluation of its functioning and, if necessary, it would be until his third year in office when he would propose legal changes.
However, in practice, regulatory and administrative changes soon followed, halting the sector's development by cancelling long-term auctions and oil rounds in the first instance. Afterwards, the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) significantly decreased the approval of permits to such an extent that, in the case of electricity generation, not a single permit has been granted to the private sector in a year.
Then, the Ministry of Energy established the Reliability Policy that sought to change access to transmission and distribution networks, as well as the economic dispatch criteria. However, the Supreme Court invalidated a large part of these criteria. Then, in February and March 2021, reforms to the main energy sector laws were approved: the Electricity Industry Law and the Hydrocarbons Law. Both, to date, have been suspended by the judiciary.
Therefore, the last step to fundamentally change the current legal framework is the constitutional reform initiative on energy matters that the Executive sent to the Chamber of Deputies on 30 September, the content of which is already widely known, and which is currently pending discussion in the Legislative Branch.
This initiative encompasses all the changes that this administration had sought to implement in the energy sector, through laws, policies, agreements and regulatory modifications, during the first half of the six-year term.
