After several months of prolonged electrical rationing and an energy crisis that has not ceased, The government of Ecuador suspended power cuts for homes since Friday.
“We have complied,” said the Minister of Energy in charge, Inés Manzano, in a message published on her X account, formerly Twitter, in which she highlighted that “today the management of the electricity crisis is expressed in results.” Also, he announced the arrival of a new floating energy barge to contribute 100 megawatts to the national energy system.
The end of the cuts excludes seven large industries such as mining, which will not receive the supply until the end of December.
“The crisis does not end today with the suspension of blackouts,” he told the news agency AP Carolina Bernal, expert and professor at the National Polytechnic. If the implementation of thermoelectric energy is not completed and if the climatic conditions do not favor the rains to continue, “we could return to rationing”he stated.
A massive blackout at the beginning of September anticipated what would become a severe crisis in the sector days later that led to the application of rationing throughout the country that lasted until 14 hours a day and affected homes and the productive sector.
The historic drought was, according to the authorities, the cause of the decline in the river basins that supply the country’s main hydroelectric plants, which had to operate at minimum levels and even stopped their activity.
Ecuador’s energy supply depends more than 70% on waterbringing the deficit to 1,800 megawatts for an average daily demand of more than 4,000.
But experts maintain that the dry period or dry period occurs annually between October and March, so the authorities should have taken the necessary measures to avoid the crisis.
In a first estimate made by the Minister of Economy, Juan Carlos Vega, the losses due to electricity rationing amounted to about 1.7 billion dollars, which is equivalent to 1.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The specialist Fernando Salinas considered that only a specific increase in the energy supply has been achieved to cover the remainder of the month of December. He added that to avoid future crises the government should guarantee coverage of the 400 or 500 megawatts that demand grows annually and solve a deficit electricity rate, he told the AP.
For Rodrigo Jarrín, a 52-year-old merchant, with the end of the cuts “relief came” and he hoped that “it won’t just be for December.”
(With information from AP)
