Ecuador will experience nationwide blackouts lasting eight hours for four nights next week after entering a new period of electricity shortagecaused by a severe drought in its main hydroelectric plants, which prevents it from meeting domestic demand.
According to the criteria of
The Ecuadorian government announced in a statement on Monday, September 16, that power outages will be registered throughout the country from 10:00 p.m. (3:00 GMT) to 6:00 a.m. local time (11:00 GMT), starting on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week.
A nationwide blackout of similar characteristics had already been announced for Wednesday night, in order to carry out maintenance work on the national electrical infrastructure with a view to a new period of electricity rationing.
For this blackout, the Minister of the Interior, Mónica Palencia, announced the Government’s intention to decree a curfew to avoid disturbances during the suspension of the electric flow, which will take place under the “internal armed conflict” which President Daniel Noboa declared to be a crime prevention organization at the beginning of the year.
This Thursday, September 19, it is expected that the Armed Forces take control of Mazar reservoirthe second largest in the country, as ordered by Noboa in the previous days to avoid sabotage in this critical infrastructure for supplying the national electricity demand.
The Mazar reservoir, located in the southern Andean province of Azuay, has a capacity of 410 million cubic meters of water and serves to supply a complex of three hydroelectric plants located in the Paute River basin with an installed capacity of 1,757 megawatts.
However, in recent days the level of this water reserve has dropped dramatically due to the lack of rain in the Andes mountains for several months.
This is the third period of blackouts that Ecuador will endure in less than a yearafter the one that occurred at the end of 2023 and others that occurred in mid-April of this year 2024.
The established cut-off time has been chosen with the aim of generating the least possible impact on productive activities and the development of working days.
Unlike those previous periods of electricity rationing, in which power cuts occurred during the day in different time slots and in different areas, this time They will cover the entire country at the same time and will take place at night.
“The schedule for the power cut has been chosen with the aim of generating the least possible impact on productive activities and the development of working days,” the government said in its statement.
In this regard, the Noboa administration also arranged for the public sector to carry out teleworking Thursday and Friday of this week and also next week.
It is estimated that every hour of power rationing causes losses of around 12 million dollars in the country.
At the beginning of this month there was a blackout in eleven of the twenty-four provinces of Ecuadorwhich lasted several hours due to a failure at the Paute hydroelectric plant, according to the state-owned National Electricity Operator (Cenace).
The government had warned in previous months of the high probability that the country would return to blackouts due to the severe dry season, so it established processes for contracting and renting electricity generation to deal with this crisis.
Among these processes, the following stands out: floating power plant rental from the Karpowership company, belonging to the Turkish energy group Karadeniz, which since last week has been generating some 100 megawatts for the Ecuadorian electrical system.
Electricity imported by Ecuador from Colombia was also crucial in the blackouts of previous months.
EFE
#Ecuador #nightly #blackouts #country #due #energy #crisis #caused #drought