Enel's São Paulo grid kept failing after warnings, and Aneel's rapporteur voted to end it

On 6 October 2026 Agnes Costa, the rapporteur on Brazil's electricity regulator Aneel for the process on ending Enel's concession in Greater São Paulo, voted to recommend ending it. She said the recommendation followed repeated inspections, recurring breaches, penalties of rising size, several results plans, a formal notice and continued monitoring. In her words, the December 2025 blackout was not a new failure but "the materialisation of problems previously identified and not resolved".

According to Estadão, the area has had three major blackouts since 2023; the latest, in December 2025, hit more than 4 million properties. Enel says 80% of those affected had power back within 24 hours. Since 2019, 11 improvement plans had been agreed, and seven were rejected. Costa said the inspection found deficiencies with no causal link to the intensity of the storm, and that a service leaving large groups of consumers without power for long periods is not adequate even if overall continuity indicators are within regulatory limits.

Enel defended itself on several points. It said it raised investment by 73% and operating resources by 31% between 2023 and 2025, and put its investment at about R$6.5 billion from 2024 to July 2026. It said emergency response had improved, and argued that the process had legal and procedural flaws and that it was being treated differently from other distributors. Mayors of 22 municipalities and the electricity workers' union opposed ending the contract.

Threatened loss of the Greater São Paulo concession, after seven of 11 improvement plans since 2019 were rejected.

Aneel's inspection found slow dispatch of crews, weak crisis management, poor shift scheduling and overloaded operations centres.

It also found low resolution by night crews, vehicles unsuited to the complexity of the incidents, and too few specialised teams.

Problems the company had already been formally warned about persisted, so each new outage repeated known failures.

Regulatory averages stayed within limits while long outages for particular groups of customers continued.

Meeting the regulator's average metrics is not enough when the same customers keep losing power for days. Fix the failures regulators have already named.

As of the 6 October 2026 report, the rapporteur's vote was a recommendation: if the Aneel board recommends ending the concession, the process goes to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, which makes the final decision. The minister, Alexandre Silveira, had called for the contract to be ended after the December blackout but had recently favoured a negotiated exit. By law Enel would be compensated for investments not yet amortised, and ministry technicians were already drafting a technical assessment of ending the concession.