A judge stops López Obrador's energy reform one day after its entry into force

A visit by members of the Government to the Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant, in 2019.Twitter Manuel Barlett / TWITTER MANUEL BARLETT

Stop to the energy reform of the Mexican Government one day after its entry into force.

A district judge has ordered this Thursday the temporary suspension of the application of the new norm after the protection presented by a photovoltaic company.

It is the first victory of the private sector against this priority of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Energy companies, the most affected by the new regulation, consider that it violates the constitutional principle of free competition by granting advantageous conditions to the parastatal Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) over private plants, many of them renewable.

In the agreement, the second district judge specialized in economic competition in Mexico City has determined that the suspension should benefit all companies participating in the wholesale electricity market, not only Parque Solar Orejana, the complainant.

"If granting a precautionary measure with particular effects, that is, only for the complainant, this District Court (...) would be giving it a competitive advantage over other participants in the electricity industry," he justifies.

The judge also recalls that he has granted similar suspensions on previous occasions and that the measure "is deemed adequate to protect the rights to free competition," he states in the brief where he sets the date of the hearing for April 27.

Before that, on March 18, the court will determine whether to grant the definitive suspension to the company while it resolves the merits of the matter.

The Government will then have the opportunity to present arguments against the suspension.

The decision opens the legal battle to stop the amendment to the Electricity Industry Law, approved last week in the Senate.

In addition to the affected companies, environmental organizations contemplate presenting appeals to challenge a law that, they argue, conflicts with the right to a healthy environment established in the Constitution.

Before the approval of the norm, the opposition political parties had also threatened to present, in turn, a constitutionality action before the Supreme Court.

This Thursday's legal stumble feels like

.

Since 2019, the López Obrador government has tried to reverse, administratively and without changing the law, the liberalization of the sector promoted during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto.

All these attempts have been paralyzed in the courts through legal protection from companies and environmental organizations.

One of the chambers of the Supreme Court of Justice, the constitutional court, recently struck down various aspects of a new policy of the Ministry of Energy that sought to limit private participation in the sector.

With the reform of the Electricity Industry Law, the president wanted to overcome the

legal

in which his previous efforts had ended and push for a new model that eliminates, among other aspects, the principle of economic dispatch by which the cheapest plants they are the first to upload their electricity to the grid.

Thanks to this change, the CFE has priority in dispatching, regardless of the cost or age of its plants, over renewable plants in private hands.

As the protection shows, López Obrador's strategy has for the moment fallen on deaf ears.

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