Venezuela’s Clash for Control: Charting a Path Through Uncertainty

• In an interview for The Diary, Two experts in the area detailed the current state of the country’s electrical system

Behind him blackout that left much of Venezuela without electricity on August 30 And despite statements by Nicolás Maduro’s government that attributed the failure to an alleged “sabotage” of the National Electric System (SEN) by the opposition, experts point out that the recent event is due to the lack of maintenance of the structures.

Víctor Poleo, electrical engineer and former Vice Minister of Energy and Mines (1999-2001), explained exclusively for The Diary that the root cause of the failures is “nested in the intentional ruin of the national interconnected system.”

“The outlook has already been bleak since the creation of Corpoelec in 2007,” he added.

He said that random events such as lightning or droughts are to be expected, but there are always engineering solutions. The resolution of these events is complicated when “qualified human capital is non-existent and when the financial capital (apparently) allocated for infrastructure maintenance is not used correctly,” he explained.

“No two events are the same”

Victor Poleo recalled that the blackout on March 7, 2019 occurred after failures caused by fires under 765 thousand volt lines on the 80 kilometer Guri-Malena section.

At that time, the volume of disconnected energy was 7,500 megawatts sent to the center-north-west on three 765 thousand volt lines Guri-Malena-San Gerónimo (Guárico), which from there open in a trident towards Caracas, Yaracuy and Maracaibo (Zulia). “An event of such magnitude was caused by not pruning the weeds and vegetation in the Guri-Malena section,” he said.

Poleo pointed out that in addition to the lack of qualified personnel to deal with the fluctuations and instability of large loads, the thermoelectric plants in the north had no gas or fuel and no maintenance had been carried out.

“No two events are the same. The failure of August 30, 2024 occurred on the Guri-El Tigre section, La Canoa substation, on a 400,000 volt line with a capacity of 1,500 megawatts. Much smaller dimensions than the 2019 event,” he explained.

He said that in the recent failure the electrical system was disconnected by a lightning strike that was not cleared by the line’s protection systems, “predictably because they were inactive or damaged and not replaced.”

Flight of financial capital

Victor Poleo highlighted that it is estimated that approximately 100 billion dollars were allocated to the electricity sector between 1999 and 2017.

The Political Ecology Observatory of Venezuela (OEP), in a published report In March 2020, he explained that during the 20 years of the “Bolivarian revolution” it is estimated that some 105 billion dollars have been “invested” in the Venezuelan electricity sector.

The organization indicated that this amount is equivalent to the entire nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Ecuador during 2019, double the nominal GDP of Uruguay in 2019 and 10 times the nominal GDP of a country like Nicaragua.

The OEP mentioned that engineer José Aguilar specified that more than 65% of the 105 billion dollars appear to have been spent after the electrical emergency was declared in 2010.

According to the report, around 36.7 billion dollars were spent before 2010. After the declaration of the electrical emergency and until 2019, 68.2 billion dollars were “invested” in electrical infrastructure to improve the quality of the electrical service, a period in which the country received income from oil and derivative exports for a total of 528 billion dollars.

“Investment in the electricity sector by the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, in this second period “post-declaration of the electricity crisis,” represented 13% of the total gross national income from the export of oil and derivatives, again an outrage, an amount sufficient for Venezuela to have the best electrical system in Latin America,” said the OEP.

In this regard, it indicates that the decrease in the availability of electric energy for consumption by Venezuelans fell by 45% after having invested 11% of the total income from oil exports over 20 years in supposed improvements in electrical infrastructure and thermoelectric generation for the country.

If there was political intention to ‘resolve’ the electricity crisis, there was engineering and capital to do so,” said Victor Poleo.

Share on

Reference photo

Opacity of information

José Aguilar, engineer and international consultant for Energy Generation and Risks, assured for The Diary that, due to the lack of coordination and dysfunctional management of the national state electricity company, the country has been hiding information about what is really happening in the country for more than 5,000 consecutive days, because the outlook is not encouraging.

However, he stressed that it is not possible to eliminate the recurrence of problems, as evidenced by the blackout in March 2019 and the one in August 2024.

“We had two major blackouts in 2019 and now we have a recurrence of a major blackout also on August 30. For its part, the regime is in a circus that everything is sabotage, that the blame always lies with someone else and not its management, when unfortunately the failures derive from wide-ranging events due to lack of maintenance,” he said.

The specialist stressed that technical problems cannot be resolved with seriousness and knowledge of the country’s electrical system if management failures are not recognized and opacity is maintained.

There is a backlog of overdue maintenance. There is a practice of equipment cannibalism and equipment obsolescence. Everything comes together and there is no effective management that can solve these problems, so they are dislocating and destroying the system little by little,” he added.

Share on

In this regard, Aguilar explained that “the (electrical) system is blurred” because those who manage it are undermining it. He added that currently the remaining equipment is working under duress and the operating practices are not updated.

“The current system we have is not the one we should have, it is the one we have left,” he said.

Intensified energy crisis

A report presented in January 2024 by the Hum Venezuela platform, which studies the impact of the Complex Humanitarian Emergency in the country, revealed that the electricity crisis in Venezuela experienced an escalation in 2023, with a constant daily fluctuation of energy in all states of the country.

The organization determined that the population suffering from intermittent and prolonged power outages “increased alarmingly,” rising from 25.9% to 61.9% between 2022 and 2023. This phenomenon was attributed to the 80% drop in electricity generation capacities, “a result of the fragility of the equipment and the lack of trained personnel.”

The “blackouts” increased by 155.9%, going from 147.5 thousand to more than 230 thousand between 2022 and 2023, occurring more frequently in the states of Mérida, Táchira, Falcón, Miranda, Zulia and Anzoátegui, and affecting between 70% and 90% of their populations.

The report found that 67.4% of households included battery-powered lamps or flashlights in their needs due to failures in the electrical system.

Photo: EFE/ Henry Chirinos

Deterioration of the National Electric System

More than five years after the national blackout of 2019, The country continues to register constant fluctuations in light which demonstrate the poor condition of Venezuela’s SEN, which has deteriorated over the last decade due to the lack of preventive maintenance at power plants.

Since then, the situation has not changed and the country continues to fail to produce what is demanded. “The investments have been very specific and have not been for preventive maintenance, but strictly corrective, which has not been immediate either,” explained an expert in the sector, who preferred not to share his identity, in a previous interview for The Diary.

The specialist indicated that there is equipment in the country that suffers from “fatigue” due to the time of use and that it must be replaced to guarantee the provision and continuity of the electric service. However, he commented that this is not something that the authorities are doing and what is known is that there is no equipment to replace them, due to the fact that two large suppliers of these materials maintain an embargo against the country.

The demand for electricity in Venezuela has gone from approximately 23 thousand megawatts, with a similar production, to 17 thousand megawatts. According to the electrical expert, the country is only generating 14 thousand megawatts and that is the reason for the constant power outages, especially in the interior of the country.

Aguilar and Poleo, for their part, stressed that service failures could continue to occur as long as a state policy that does not recognize the weaknesses of the sector is maintained.

Related news

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘648851442656403’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);