HOW EFFICIENT ARE THE BRAZILIAN ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION COMPANIES?

• DOI: 10.22533/at.ed.8132010021

• Palavras-chave: Atena

• Keywords: Atena

• Abstract:

  During the last years, the

  electricity sector has experienced great

  changes, especially within the economic

  regulation. After receiving several criticisms, the

  rate of return regulation has been replaced by

  incentive regulation. The main objective of this

  regulation is to stimulate business efficiency.

  This paper proposes an alternative application

  of Data Envelopment Analysis to the Brazilian

  case, characterized by a large territory: the use

  of Unit Networks in the distribution segment

  to regionalize the concession area and then

  to analyse the efficiencies separately. Many

  regulators use the entire distribution company

  as a Decision Making Unit for price regulation

  when benchmarking is applied. However,

  in Brazil, quality performance is measured

  in detail using sets of consuming units; i.e.,

  quality is measured using small parts of the

  company. Given that efficiency cannot be

  assessed without considering various aspects

  of quality performance and characteristics

  of the underlying environment in the utility’s

  concession area, this paper tries to find the tradeoff

  among management, quality, environment

  and costs. Therefore, the main contribution of

  this paper is twofold: the solution for Brazilian

  distribution companies’ heterogeneity and the

  choice of variables that are better measures

  for an efficiency analysis. Some examples

  with Brazilian utilities are provided to show the

  advantages of the proposed approach.

• Número de páginas: 16