After a long four-day holiday, Ecuadorians are returning to the reality of daily planned power outages.

Although Colombia has already delivered the 500 megawatts offered to President Guillermo Lasso on October 28, it is not enough to prevent the cuts from continuing to affect us today.

The Esmeraldas I thermal power plant has started operating and will supply the country with electricity at full capacity.

Uncertainty exists among citizens and it is increasing every day because there is no clarity when the Government’s obligations to put an end to this problem will be fulfilled, such as, for example, the conclusion of negotiations with private energy producers, the contracting of a barge and the import of natural gas for heat production .

Added to this uncertainty are the various versions of the regime’s own authority. At the beginning of the month, the Deputy Minister of Electricity, Juan José Espinosa, assured that “the electricity tariff schedule must be revised.” Two days later, the Department of Energy indicated that “energy contracting will not result in a rate increase for the public.”

About 1,000 million dollars will cost Ecuador the announced measures to combat power outages

Today marks ten days since the start of the blackout, and so far the import of energy from Colombia has been achieved at an as yet unknown price and payment method, energy that has made it possible to reduce the reduction by 50 percent.

But there is much more to be done to solve the country’s energy crisis and ensure that blackouts do not recur year after year. The population demands answers, but also sustainable solutions.

Power outages in Ecuador continue this Monday, November 6: these are the schedules of some cities and provinces

In these ten days of cuts, large and small entrepreneurs are already talking about millions of losses. The Ministry of Energy itself said that it costs citizens 1.5 dollars per kilowatt reduction, and if they last an hour and a half every day, the cost in one month would be 242 million dollars for the commercial and industrial sector.

We are on the threshold of Christmas, a month that is considered to have a recovery in sales and the reactivation of the economy that is so necessary for Ecuadorians who today face serious problems of lack of work and, above all, insecurity. (OR)