Peak summer electricity price reform or accelerated progress

Resource price reform is the focus of this year's National Development and Reform Commission's work. A few days ago, at the National Summer Power Television Summer 2013 conference call, the relevant person in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission once again stressed that the price reform of resource products should be done well. Recently, multiple signals have shown that the pace of power price reform is accelerating.

Deputy Director of the National Development and Reform Commission Lian Weiliang put forward at the summer meeting of power peaks, "Conscientiously implement resource product price reform measures, support conditional regions to carry out electricity purchases from power users to power generation enterprises, and promote trials on the power system reform of the power sales side. ".

At the above meeting, the relevant person in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission also stated that it is necessary to earnestly implement relevant measures for electricity price reform, simplify the classification of sales tariffs, expand the scope of implementation of the same price of electricity for industrial and commercial use, and improve the coal price linkage mechanism and the pricing mechanism for hydropower and nuclear power on-line prices.

Not only that, but a few days ago, another city joined the camp of ladder prices. On June 15th, Chongqing announced the implementation of the ladder electricity price plan: When the monthly electricity consumption of each household exceeds 401 degrees (inclusive), the price of electricity per kWh increases by 3 cents. The policy will be implemented from July 1.

More importantly, the National Development and Reform Commission has issued a notice beforehand and decided to simplify the structure classification of sales price, and gradually integrate the current eight categories of sales price according to the voltage class and load characteristics, etc., for household electricity use, agricultural production use, and industrial and commercial use and other purposes. Three types of electricity, and further standardize the scope of application of various types of sales price, so that the structural classification and scope of application of sales price is more scientific and reasonable.

According to industry sources, the simplified reform of the classification of sales tariffs is a necessary step in the process of China's electricity price reform. Perhaps after simplifying the sales price system, the next step is to reform the transmission and distribution prices. This is a useful reform that is worth looking forward to.

Earlier, Lin Boqiang, director of the Energy Economics Research Center at Xiamen University, once said that electricity prices are a key point in power system reform. If the government is willing to intervene in electricity prices (such as subsidies and taxes) in a relatively market-oriented way, then the reform of the electricity market will have a lot of room for imagination. If the government's choice is not matched with the power model, the inefficiency and transaction costs caused by the chaos in the industrial chain will push up the price. If the government chooses to evade the reform of electricity prices for the time being, the only possibility to straighten out the electricity industry chain is the vertical integration model. It can be said that without electricity price reform, it is difficult to carry out effective power system reform. "The previous stage of power reform was not satisfactory in reality. One of the main reasons was that the electricity price reform had not kept pace."

From this perspective, with the advancement of electricity price reform, the reform of the power system will also enter the fast lane.