The new government began with a cease-fire in the shutdowns that were initiated and inherited by the previous government. On that November 23, when the government changed, Ecuador had electricity without cuts, and in these days of Christmas and New Year holidays there will be no rationalization, but the journey was coming and passing: there are power cuts, they are suspended, come back, they become longer, shorter .

Decisions change as the rain falls, and Energy Minister Andrea Arrobo announced that rationing has been suspended until January 1, 2024 due to “technical management of the efficient management of hydropower reservoirs” and the results achieved in savings. campaign that achieved a reduction of daily energy consumption by more than 4%.

The government suspends power cuts until January 1, 2024

For the energy analyst, Fernando Salinas, the changes correspond to two causes. The first is due to the poor communication strategy of the Ministry of Energy. “Last week it was announced that there will be three hours in the regime, this week two and then that there will be no reduction until January 1.”

While the second reason is attributed to the rains that were present in the Pauta river basin about four days ago, which allowed some recovery of the flow and water storage in the Mazar and Amaluza reservoirs. “These atypical rains for that date helped us temporarily have enough hydroelectric power to meet demand for the next few days. “An unexpected event (of rain) that restored our power generation capacity.”

This is how the decisions were made in these four weeks:

At the beginning of this week, 75% of the country’s energy production was from hydroelectric plants, according to data from Cenace.

When the blackouts began in the country on October 27, they lasted four hours a day for the Sierra and Oriente, and three hours for the coast. And they were reduced in time after former president Guillermo Lasso’s trip to Colombia to “seek his support to solve the energy crisis in Ecuador” and the analysis carried out by Cenace. Thus, within a few days, they were reduced by half: two hours for the Sierra and Oriente and one and a half for the coast, which remained until December 14.

Power outages will decrease to 50% between Monday and Wednesday

In January, the then Minister of Energy and Mining, Fernando Santos Alvite, preferred not to give a concrete answer about the possibility of a power outage, “because it depends on Diosito whether he will send us water. But I would say, as a last resort, there will be no blackout. The Ministry is taking measures,” he said in an interview with Notihoj.

Nine months later rationing came. One of the measures of the previous government was the import of electricity from Colombia, but the current minister asked if it was negotiated expensively, because according to the official, Ecuador was paying 35% more.

Former Minister of Energy: ‘I miscalculated, it’s a human error’, on the costs of importing electricity from Colombia

For his part, former Minister Santos recognized a human error in calculating the import price from a neighboring country. “Maybe I believed that Colombia would sell us a large amount of energy at a good price. I miscalculated, it’s human error. But every current minister will also become a victim of this statist system,” he declared on December 5.

According to Salinas, the crisis will not ease until April 2024 when new rains arrive in the eastern basins where the hydroelectric plants are located, but the threat of rationing will return in October 2024 if no action is taken.

With this in mind, he makes some recommendations so that the same situation from 2023 does not repeat itself: