According to Brazil's power trading clearing CCEE, the unregulated electricity market in Brazil, where electricity distributors and producers are free to negotiate their own contracts with large consumers, expanded rapidly in 2015 and should rise by around 30% in 2016, to the detriment of power distributors.
The CCEE currently has 549 requests from consumers seeking to enter the free market and accounting for 25% of Brazil's total demand; if all these requests are approved, the number of customers on the free market would rise by more than 30% in 2016. Consumers are attracted by declining, spot-indexed electricity prices on the free market, due to the economic recession and large hydropower availability, and they estimate savings on their electricity bills at 35%. In 2015, spot power prices declined from R$388/MWh (US$98/MWh) in January to R$116/MWh (US$30/MWh) in December 2015 (spot prices could even remain as low as R$30/MWh during 2016 and early 2017), while regulated prices rose by around 40% to pass the costs from emergency thermal power generation due to the 2014 drought on to consumers.
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