VenEconomy: It is payback time for the Chavez administration when it comes to the electricity service. None of the sector's authorities, neither the old nor the new, can claim that they did not know that the present crisis of the national electricity system was definitely on the cards owing to lack of maintenance, disinvestment, and, above all, for having given priority to the political over technical and managerial considerations.

Since 1999, different specialist sources have repeatedly warned the government, with reports in hand, that, unless measures were taken and a comprehensive, coherent investment plan implemented, the electricity service in Venezuela would be in a state of collapse by 2009 or 2010. But those warnings fell on deaf revolutionary ears and now time has run out.

The government can no longer cover up the state of the electricity sector with lies and by manipulating the figures, as it does to gloss over the decline of PDVSA and its shrinking oil production, unemployment or the crisis in the health system. Countrywide blackouts and recurrent failures are not something that can be denied or hidden. Everyone is suffering the consequences.

But the problem facing Venezuelans now is not about having sufficient electricity to meet basic needs or setting the country back to the days of candlelight. The truly serious problem confronting Venezuelans is that the revolutionary government, faced with inescapable consequences of its incompetence, lack of technical know-how, negligence, and corruption, instead of coming up with serious proposals that would put things right, is announcing erratic, improvised, confused, and desperate measures that will not remedy the situation; and, what is worse, these government announcements are peppered with aggression, coercion, harassment, prohibitions, punishments, and privations for the population.

For example, one of the measures announced is the warning that the government has not discarded the possibility of "taking" any private thermoelectric power station generating more than 2 megawatts and putting it at "the service of the nation," if the owners fail to be fully self-sufficient in electricity, meeting 100% of their industrial and commercial requirements, and do not contribute any surplus to the national grid. And, as is habitual, this warning was accompanied by direct threats against business groups and corporations, in particular the Sambil shopping malls and Empresas Polar.

The President does not stop to think that many of these generators are unable to send their electricity to the national grid as they are incompatible with the national system and adapting them would be extremely expensive, or that these generators, because they use flammable fuel, are highly pollutant and potentially dangerous.

There are indications that the charges for electricity will be revised, which makes sense given that they have been frozen since 2002, resulting in disinvestment in the sector. However, instead of accompanying this adjustment with an educational campaign to discourage high consumption and promote the rational use of energy, the authorities are resorting to threatening and intimidating a sector of the population.

What seems to be lacking, yet again, in the government's announcements is a credible medium- and long-term plan for the sector that would solve the problems and not plunge the population into greater poverty, a plan aimed at improving Venezuelans' standard of living or that would, at least, permit minimum conditions of subsistence, even if they were just slightly better than the levels of rationing to which its idyllic Cuba is subjected.

It is evident that the government's proposal for solving the electricity crisis contains no clear objectives in the areas of investment, planning, and construction of an efficient electricity generation, transmission, and distribution network, which would be the least one would expect from a government that was interested in promoting the country's development and modernization and the well-being of its population.

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=346843&CategoryId=13303