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The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has ruled out opening onshore distribution assets to competitive tendering during the current price control period.
Energy minister Lord Bourne confirmed to the Energy and Climate Change Committee earlier this week that the government has no plans to act upon powers that would be given to them by the energy bill currently in pre-legislative scrutiny in the near future.
Bourne said the late inclusion of distribution in the move to open transmission assets up to competition was an attempt to “future proof” the legislation.
“I am sure we would have been attacked from the other side if having done this in a bill, let’s say it does happen in the coming session, we then came back a couple of years later and tried another one on distribution assets,” he said.
“You probably would be here saying: ‘why on earth didn’t you do this two years ago?’ It is future proofing. We have the time to look at it.”
Earlier this month the Energy Networks Association (ENA) called for written clarity that the new powers would not be acted upon for distribution network operators until 2023, after being included in the bill “at a very late stage”.
Ofgem also told the committee that it has “no immediate plans to introduce competition for distribution networks”.
Ofgem’s acting senior partner for networks Maxine Frerk said: “At some stage in the future we may want to look at distribution but we have not done anything like that consultation and we would not being doing anything in the short term in that area.”
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