Tuesday’s blackouts in some states of the country are the prelude to the energy crisis that the current government will inherit to the next, and of course to all Mexicans.
“It was because of the heat,” explains the President, with another phrase that portrays the ineptitude and failure of his government.
Saying that energy consumption increases in the hot months is obvious. It happens every year.
So what happens with the blackout?
It happens that in this six-year term, no new electricity generation plants have been built: those that came into operation in 2019 were built by the previous government.
There are no new plants and the system will be overwhelmed by energy demand.
Enrique Ochoa says in the interview he gave me for the book AMLO, the cost of madnesswhich we are going through an “energy paralysis” because the current government is the first that failed to build new power plants to increase the availability of electrical energy.
The world, and therefore also Mexico, is increasingly more electric, and instead of producing it and building more transmission lines, the government has used the need for electric energy as an instrument of political control.
Enrique Ochoa points out that this model of using energy as an instrument of control and not as an indispensable input, consists of the government being the one that generates, transmits, distributes, markets, and also decides who invests, when, where and with whom. associate.
In short: the government, with political criteria or conveniences and cronyism, decides who has access to energy and who does not.
For large companies that plan to establish themselves in Mexico, the uncertainty of electricity supply is fundamental. And with clean, environmentally friendly energy sources.
Ochoa says: “All these elements will translate, in due course, into lost opportunities, jobs that could have been generated, blackouts, interruptions, and lower quality of service. Mexico has been losing opportunities. “It is a six-year period of lost opportunities.”
And also economic losses. Mexico should make money, and a lot, with its energy industry. But, against all logic, he loses.
During previous governments CFE made money. Now that “CFE was rescued”, the outlook is deficient.
Enrique Ochoa explains that in 2022, to cite an example, “CFE lost 39 billion pesos, and the government also gave it 82 billion pesos. They lost 39 billion and on top of that they had to give you 82 billion pesos to cover the well. But the boy already drowned.”
The dependence on imported natural gas has also increased, given Pemex’s inability to produce it. We buy it from Texas, where there is “a gas revolution,” which exports it to half the world.
-Is there no natural gas in Mexico?
-Of course there is. There it is waiting to be extracted in Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Chihuahua… There are also the pipelines that can transport that gas. The pipelines do not distinguish nationality to move gas.
-AND? What happened?
-Unfortunately, the natural gas bidding rounds were stopped by this administration.
The “CFE bailout” has made us more dependent on the outside world (from Texas), more vulnerable, and less efficient because energy production is increasingly insufficient to meet the needs of industry and homes.
Enrique Ochoa says: “Much of the gas that we Mexicans consume comes from fracking. It is mined in Texas. It could be extracted in Coahuila, Tamaulipas, in Nuevo León, in Chihuahua. It is not being done because this government stopped the implementation of the energy reform that opened this sector to competition.”
We are left with a State monopoly that produces electrical energy with polluting sources, expensive and insufficient for the country’s needs.
And in Mexico there is gas, sun, wind, underground steam and oil: everything to be a power in energy generation.
What there is not is a government with three grams of common sense.
