Post by scumbuster on Apr 23, 2016 6:55:31 GMT -5
Venezuela 4 Hour Rolling Blackouts Deepen Crisis
CARACAS -- Venezuela is in crisis and a new round of electricity measures will only deepen it, according to experts consulted by the Latin American Herald Tribune.
President Nicolas Maduro announced that, for the next 40 days, almost all of Venezuela will go without electricity for up to four hours a day.
Alberto De Lima, an engineer and electricity consultant who helped plan the existing interconnected system, says poor maintenance, electricity theft and lack of meters in government-provided residences are complicating the matter.
In the latest round of hard measures, the government (which nationalized all electricity companies in 2006-2007) just unplugs everybody for four hours a day in most of Venezuela. Caracas has so far been excluded from programmed cuts, although blackouts and brownouts occur daily.
1 MILLION METER-LESS HOUSES
There are one million government-provided houses that lack meters in Venezuela. People there do not pay for the electricity and do not even know how much they use. De Lima said that implementing four-hour power cuts in areas near those housing developments is especially tricky. “You have to cut the power at transmission substation level. That means you are leaving a huge area, geographically, without power: not only residential, where you could reduce with less trauma, but also hospitals, traffic lights, gas stations, etc.,” the expert said. “You can’t be selective, there will be wholesale cuts”.
“Wholesale cuts” in electric power for several hours a day spell additional trouble for the already ailing Venezuelan economy. In 2016 and for the second year in a row, Venezuela will be the country with the largest GDP drop in the Latin American region (21 countries), according to the IMF. Venezuela is expected to shed 8.5% of its GDP this year, after losing some 5% already in 2015.
About half of all of the electricity generated in Venezuela is stolen during transmission, according to De Lima and other sources. Most of the theft is carried out in poor and dangerous areas, Venezuelan “barrios”, slums inaccessible to the police, not to mention to electricity service crews and where the bulk of the “chavista” constituency (that hasn’t yet received a free government house) lives.
De Lima expects “barrios” being spared the cuts. “I don’t really see the government leaving the barrios without power. And that complicates matters further. It should be the people who do not pay for power the ones who endure the cuts,” the consultant says. “A 50% electricity loss due to theft is extremely high. In any country, 20% theft is high."
According to Consultores de Energía, a Caracas consultancy firm, there is a widening gap between the electricity demanded and the electricity generated, of an unbelievable 30% (most countries are in the single digits) that makes rationing almost mandatory. Venezuela now demands 18,500MW a year and only generates some 15,500MW, the firm said. And of that generation, the bulk (10,000MW a year) comes from Guri, an hydroelectric dam complex in southern Venezuela that has been overworked to the point where the reservoir is operating at crisis levels.
Venezuela has been rationing electricity one way or the other since 2006. In 2009, then President Chavez declared an “electricity emergency” allowing for the acquisition of thermal plants without an open bidding processes. The opposition now claims that during that emergency, some $60 billion were misspent, misallocated or just plain stolen, in plants that were never built or in old equipment that was bought as new.
laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=2410595&CategoryId=10717
CARACAS -- Venezuela is in crisis and a new round of electricity measures will only deepen it, according to experts consulted by the Latin American Herald Tribune.
President Nicolas Maduro announced that, for the next 40 days, almost all of Venezuela will go without electricity for up to four hours a day.
Alberto De Lima, an engineer and electricity consultant who helped plan the existing interconnected system, says poor maintenance, electricity theft and lack of meters in government-provided residences are complicating the matter.
In the latest round of hard measures, the government (which nationalized all electricity companies in 2006-2007) just unplugs everybody for four hours a day in most of Venezuela. Caracas has so far been excluded from programmed cuts, although blackouts and brownouts occur daily.
1 MILLION METER-LESS HOUSES
There are one million government-provided houses that lack meters in Venezuela. People there do not pay for the electricity and do not even know how much they use. De Lima said that implementing four-hour power cuts in areas near those housing developments is especially tricky. “You have to cut the power at transmission substation level. That means you are leaving a huge area, geographically, without power: not only residential, where you could reduce with less trauma, but also hospitals, traffic lights, gas stations, etc.,” the expert said. “You can’t be selective, there will be wholesale cuts”.
“Wholesale cuts” in electric power for several hours a day spell additional trouble for the already ailing Venezuelan economy. In 2016 and for the second year in a row, Venezuela will be the country with the largest GDP drop in the Latin American region (21 countries), according to the IMF. Venezuela is expected to shed 8.5% of its GDP this year, after losing some 5% already in 2015.
About half of all of the electricity generated in Venezuela is stolen during transmission, according to De Lima and other sources. Most of the theft is carried out in poor and dangerous areas, Venezuelan “barrios”, slums inaccessible to the police, not to mention to electricity service crews and where the bulk of the “chavista” constituency (that hasn’t yet received a free government house) lives.
De Lima expects “barrios” being spared the cuts. “I don’t really see the government leaving the barrios without power. And that complicates matters further. It should be the people who do not pay for power the ones who endure the cuts,” the consultant says. “A 50% electricity loss due to theft is extremely high. In any country, 20% theft is high."
According to Consultores de Energía, a Caracas consultancy firm, there is a widening gap between the electricity demanded and the electricity generated, of an unbelievable 30% (most countries are in the single digits) that makes rationing almost mandatory. Venezuela now demands 18,500MW a year and only generates some 15,500MW, the firm said. And of that generation, the bulk (10,000MW a year) comes from Guri, an hydroelectric dam complex in southern Venezuela that has been overworked to the point where the reservoir is operating at crisis levels.
Venezuela has been rationing electricity one way or the other since 2006. In 2009, then President Chavez declared an “electricity emergency” allowing for the acquisition of thermal plants without an open bidding processes. The opposition now claims that during that emergency, some $60 billion were misspent, misallocated or just plain stolen, in plants that were never built or in old equipment that was bought as new.
laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=2410595&CategoryId=10717