Since Monday of last week, and for eight consecutive days, power outages have once again disturbed the homes of Buenos Aires and the suburbs. There have been more than 1.2 million customers supplied by Edesur and Edenor who have experienced some type of disruption in the electricity supply in the last 8 days. Summer hasn’t started yet and the lines are already starting to sound the alarm.
The outlook for January and February is “very complicated”, according to Walter Martello, controller of the national electricity regulator (Enre), which supervises the concessions in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires (Amba), namely Edesur and Edenor.
The companies commissioned audits with weather forecasts for the coming months. “All the audits give (a) very complicated scenario,” according to the official. Enre has asked companies to prepare a “summer” plan, aimed at mitigating the impact of the cuts for these dates. Enre technicians are checking them.
The situation is more complicated in the case of Edesur than in the Edenor network, according to official data. Edesur already had more than 800,000 outages in eight days. In the past five days, exceeded 70,000 cuts per dayS. This amount constitutes a “cause for extraordinary fine”, according to Martello.
There are certain neighborhoods and geographic areas that tend to be more affected by the cuts. Among these are Caballito and surrounding areas in the city of Buenos Aires, the districts of San Vicente and Esteban Echeverría in Greater Buenos Aires, as well as the city of Glew (Admiral Brown district) in the southern suburbs. All of them are on the Enre board marked as areas where they will do special monitoring.
Over the weekend, the Enre had already asked for fines $687 million to Edesur and $293 million to Edenor. On the day Argentina faced the Netherlands in the quarter-finals of the World Cup, nearly 275,000 homes were left without electricity.
“Taking into account that the replacement times required by the concession contract have been significantly exceeded, ENRE warns that within a maximum period of 24 hours the Edenor and Edesur distributors must guarantee the normal provision of the service to all interested users”, the regulator reported Sunday.
Companies understand that electricity rates in Buenos Aires I’m 300% behind.
The government has sanctioned Edesur and Edenor, but they are more concerned about the southern concessionaire than the northern one. “We ask them to have 100 crews ready. They have 80 contracts, very few of them. They don’t have the ability to respond to low voltage problems, a breaker trip. It shows that it is a divested company ”, they object in the Management.
The company has promised a substation – in Glew – that will be ready by mid-year. This work may alleviate some of the tougher spots in the southern suburbs, but will be available after these warm months. During the closing days of the last weekend, the company was also emailing customers who hadn’t reported an outage about service status updates.
“The number of disruptions, the length of disruptions, the availability of crews, in all respects, Edesur is in a worse situation than Edenor. “The ratio is 4 or 5 to 1 (because of the number of cuts from one to another),” officials warn.
The Italian group Enel decided to divest its activities in Argentina. This includes its generating unit and Edesur, the electricity distributor. The mayors of the suburbs had already asked that the concession of that company be removed during the pandemic, due to the repeated cuts.
Various technicians consulted by clarion They agree that the Edesur network is deteriorated. From former ministers to officials of different administrations agree that Edesur has not made the investments to avoid cuts. In fact, if a new buyer appears, he will have to make a “heavy” investment in plants.
In the last twenty years, the regulatory framework for the concessions of electricity distributors has almost never been followed. The companies were only able to implement the full tariff review – a principle established in the privatizations of such companies, which were previously public – only in 2017 and 2018. The rest of the time they were subject to the decisions of their regulators.
“The fact that Edesur has made the commercial decision to sell its position in Argentina does not imply that we have to accept that this “withdrawal” is at the expense of users where the elderly, people with disabilities and users in general have to suffer this situation Martell said. it’s a statement.
“We need a clear and stable regulatory framework.” “There is no definite rule, whatever, whether rates follow inflation, the wage level, the INDEC or some mathematical formula that is not a political decision,” explained Claudio Cunha – the Brazilian who heads Edesur – to clarion at the beginning of the year.
Source: Clarin
