Venezuela recorded a sizzling eight-year high in electricity demand on August 10: 15,625 MW [Megawatts].
I’m no electrical engineer, but with an installed generation capacity of 36,000MW working at around 40% (13-14,000 MW), there is an obvious mathematical short-circuit here.
This shortfall has once again ignited a plethora of power cuts and crippling rationing, even in the once protected ‘bubble city’ of Caracas, which, while predictable, is still undesirable. But the cuts’ context is different this time compared to past rationing.
Venezuela has suffered frequent and constant cyclical power shortages since roughly 2008 – including a week-long blackout in 2019. Until now, responsibility lay with a nationalized, opaque and militarized electrical grid, serving as a lightning rod for anti-Chavista political sentiment.
Today, cuts come as large foreign capital walks the streets, charging up investment proposals to “modernize” generation sites and transmission networks at the behest of the Delcy government.
They also arrive just months after the US-tutelaged National Assembly approved a reform to the Law of the Electrical System and Service (first discussion), effectively ending the state monopoly and cracking open the grid to large foreign capital, which is salivating at the mouth to plug its high-voltage fangs into the sector.
Put this all together, and we have an electrostatic flex: the proposed solution of an 18-year problem not by using Venezuela’s vast national talent and workforce, nor by finding a local, sovereign solution to the shortfall, but by express privatizing, rolling-back 19-years of Chavez-led nationalization, and sticking US firm General Electric as the savior-to-be of the Venezuelan blackouts, all without significant popular resistance. MAGA-zap!
The Problem
Put simply, there’s not enough electricity being generated/transmitted to cover Venezuela’s limited per capita demand.
Between 2004 and 2008, the country experienced significant economic growth under Chavez, which needed powering, but the electrical grid was – and still is – left behind and worked on a tightrope for years, where a gust of wind would send it plummeting to the depths.
We have since heard a multitude of “explanations” for the fragility of the grid, some more plausible than others.
A rotating door of buffoon electrical ministers – each less credible than the last – have blamed wildfires rendering power stations inoperable, far-right terrorist sabotage, electromagnetic attacks, rats and even iguanas for short-circuits (yes, iguanas!): anything to save face!
But a more honest analysis devoid of stay-in-office dynamics unearths a cocktail of hard-to-face causes.
Venezuela’s power generation over-depends on hydropower (64%), mainly from the Guri dam in the east (10,000 MW of installed capacity), while efforts to diversify have sparked out. More than 90% of thermal generation (21,000 MW installed capacity) is out of service (only 2,700MW provided) and other renewable sources never took off, despite excellent conditions. As such, unstable weather, including the upcoming El Niño phenomenon – currently the “explanation par excellence” for the outages – has a disproportionate impact.
The Guri Hydroelectric Complex in Venezuela’s East
Added to this, on-the-ground trade union leaders have frequently denounced surging mismanagement, as well as a lack of investment and maintenance from state-run CORPOELEC, prompting blow outs and infrastructure deterioration. Career politicians or military men in technical roles in the state firm have only supercharged the mismanagement.
Corruption has also reared its head, from stealing budgets destined for generation diversification (uncompleted wind or solar farms) to cutting back on maintenance to fund lavish lifestyles.
US-led sanctions also tied the hands of Venezuela’s import-heavy economy from 2017-2025, limiting access to some repair parts and exacerbating a pre-existing structural problem.
The cyclical crisis of capitalism also flipped the switch, with not enough being done to overcome these structural and largely predictable problems when the oil rent was off the charts, while politicians rolled out the face-saving easy-excuse of “there’s no budget” when commodity prices hit the floor or sanctions started to bite.
And the Venezuelan people are not blind to these complexities – often debating them by candlelight – with many extrapolating macro-political fables such as “public-run assets don’t function”, “only private ownership works” and “socialism = corruption”.
Frizzled Electrodomestics & Undone Schoolwork
While popular work-arounds (such as charging your phone on a car battery or cooking with firewood) and the normalization of power outs (after so many years) have scaled-down their shock impact, every Venezuelan has, at some point, blown a fuse over them.
It may be hard for readers to truly comprehend the frustration, helplessness and anger that we feel when the lights go out, again. Some are trying to run a home, others a business, others study and progress in life, but at that moment emotions take over, logical thought processes about structural causes and who is responsible get demoted to a second plane, while desperation for a solution, any solution, takes over.
The human impact of the blackouts – suffered disproportionately by working communities rather than the generator-owning rich – is often overlooked. But it is now so widespread that it’s impossible to swipe away as “political rhetoric” used to “stir up trouble on social media” as it once was.
How many low-income families have been left without a fridge or washing machine after it frazzled during voltage surges (73% according to a 2022 OVSP poll)? How many kids have had to tell their teachers they couldn’t do their homework as there were no lights to read the book by? How many homes were left without water after pumping systems burned out? How many patients have been left waiting out of fear that surgical procedures would not be completed before the next blackout? And how many drivers have suffered accidents at blank traffic lights? The examples are multiple, devastating, and – above all – human.
Macroeconomic Complexities
But there is another problem.
Economic development is impossible without a regular, constant and stable supply of power. And without economic development, we have economic stagnation and thus contraction.
Since the 19th Century, the importance of power to move the cogs and wheels of the economy became clear. A brief look at the emphasis Marx placed on examples involving water vapor or coal power in Das Kapital reinforces the importance of energy to the economy.
Venezuela’s blackouts place candle-lit handcuffs on its economic development. Venezuela’s Confederation of Industrialists (Conindustria) recently published data suggesting that during the first trimester of 2026, firms suffered an average of 214 hours without power from the 488 working hours in the period in question, with roughly five power cuts a week.
A small shop owner tries to continue selling during a blackout in Venezuela
Small shop owners cannot charge customers as their card readers are out and electronic inventories rendered inaccessible. Farmers see crops dry up as electrical irrigation systems fail. Public offices close as internal computer systems crash. Banking systems report errors and phone networks go offline. Flights are delayed, gas can’t be pumped, even electronic doors and lifts stop working in shopping malls. It all grinds to a halt, and when it grinds to a halt, so does the economy.
A MAGA-Led Solution?
Securing a stable and ample electrical supply across the country has been identified by Delcy (and Donald) as one of the base conditions needed to bring in foreign investment.
No firm would put up millions for a country in which electrical supply limited productive capacity to 56% of a working day (per Conindustria data).
US Chargé d’Affaires in Caracas John Barrett alongside Venezuelan Electricity Ministry officials at the Guri Hydroelectric Complex in Venezuela
So since grasping power on January 3, Delcy has held high-level meetings with reps from US firm General Electric, signing agreements to generate 1,000 MW in the first 2 years and 4,000 MW more in the following two. GE has also booted out Chinese firms from maintenance duties at Guri.
Likewise, German firm Siemens “inspected” Venezuela’s major generation centers such as the Guri, Caruachi and Maracgua dams. Initial reports suggested that the two firms need to front $15-40 billion to get the lights back on, but since Trump now runs the books on Venezuela’s oil, this shouldn’t be a problem.
To a much lesser degree, Delcy has also looked further afield for energetic solutions. In August, she met with the African Energy Chamber, signed an agreement with Russia’s INSA to add 2,400 MW to the grid over an unknown timeline, and penned an agreement with Argentina’s IMPSA to restart work on the Tocoma Hydroelectric Dam (87% complete but paralyzed since 2014) that should provide 160 MW within 90 days. She has not appealed to Venezuela’s electrical workers for solutions.
US authorities, including Chargé d’Affaires John Barrett, have carried out “technical inspections” at Guri, considered by previous Venezuelan governments a site of strategic national interests with high-level military access needed to even get close, while the US embassy has publicly stated that “its” goal is to add 2,640 MW to Venezuela’s grid in the short term.
Delcy was quick to describe the influx of foreign firms as a “historic step” for Venezuela, paying lip service to renewed US relations that facilitated such deals.
Her strategy is clear: imported suit-clad Messiahs, Make America (and its 51st state) Great Again, thank you Mr Trump, and… zing! The lights are back on and money can flow.
Sadly, should she achieve it, she will find few Venezuelans standing in her way, and may even up her currently dire popularity ratings.
So many years in the same closed-circuit, so many frizzled fridges, blown-out boilers and toasted TVs, have all paved the way for a shift in collective consciousness.
Vast swathes of exhausted people (excluding yours truly), tired of fighting, are sadly now willing to push their objections to private ownership and large foreign capital aside and accept anti-sovereign solutions that roll back decades of popular advances and auction us off to large capital for decades to come. Just as long as our blasted lights stay on.
- Originally published at MLToday.