Power fees going up in Buenos Aires

The national government is giving the power companies a raise, through an increase in the power fees, that will fall on those who consume more than 650 kWh every two months. The increase will range from 10% to about 30% and, while Minister Julio De Vido says it'll only affect 24% of the population, others claim the middle class will be hit hard. And it seems a further raise is due next February.

The above is the news as reported everywhere in Argentina, and many people are genuinely concerned or outraged for the wrong reasons. Why? Well, despite the big headlines and the alarming newsflashes broadcast by the media, the raise is only for Buenos Aires, its metropolitan area and the city of La Plata only. Granted, that's 40% of the consumer base and Buenos Aires is the center of the universe for the porteño and for the "national" media, but you'd think they should at least qualify their statements.

I didn't say we hinterlanders* shouldn't be concerned or outraged. We have reason to be concerned since the same inflation and the companies' lack of investments that prompted the national government to grant the raise for the Buenos Aires area utility companies is having serious effects on those that supply the provinces; many had adjusted their fees up or were considering raises before this, and now it's only a matter of time before they align themselves with the capital's companies. Our own EPE (the Santa Fe Provincial Power Company) is checking its numbers right now.

* "El interior del país" ("the interior of the country") is what they call everything but Buenos Aires. That's how Argentina was structured to begin with: a colony with a big port to interface with the world, plus a broad expanse of land ripe for primary exploitation. It's customary and it doesn't sound alright. In fact, it reminds me of the ridiculous conception of Bender's robot apartment in Futurama — Bender sleeps standing up in a 1×1-metre room with no furniture, and the place where he lets Fry live is a huge room in itself... which Bender calls "the closet".

The reason for the outrage is, partly, the outrage of the porteños at this raise, because they've been enjoying ridiculously low prices for power, natural gas and public transportation at our expense since... well, ever. Time and time again I've written about the subsidized fuel for buses. As Rosario's city council is about to take the bus ticket to AR$1.60, a bus or subway ticket in Buenos Aires still costs about AR$1.

Well, as it turns out, the average residential power fee in Buenos Aires is vastly lower than the average in the rest of the country. No wonder the system has problems — you can't expect that the power grid won't collapse when you charge the lowest fee in the place with the largest and densest population, the highest per-capita income, and the highest concentration of installed top-notch air conditioners and refrigerators. According to the article in Crítica Digital, in the capital area a home that consumes 1,700 kWh will get a bill for about 88 pesos. Checking EPE's website and doing a quick calculation, we learn that the same amount of power, in Santa Fe, will punish the wasteful ways of the unfortunate consumer with a bill for 194 pesos. (The guy who writes the Crítica article obviously has math issues. He reports that fees in Buenos Aires are "194% cheaper" than in Santa Fe. Things can't be more than 100% less anything, unless you allow for negative values. Back in 2002 journalists noted that the dollar-peso parity had gone from 1 to a rate of almost 4 pesos per dollar, and reported that the peso had therefore "devalued by 400%". I recall only one news source giving the correct figure of 75%.)

Why did the porteños get this lucky all this time? Well, first of all, no-one likes being charged more, and when you have a metropolitan area with 12 million people surrounding the government seat, you don't want to make them angry. Especially when outside the capital proper you have several huge concentric rings of increasingly impoverished areas. If you control the money, you can use it to favour those near you, while the rest of the country gets indebted. Second, if you measure inflation only in the metropolitan area, it's in your best interest (image-wise and in the short term, i.e. the Argentine way) to concentrate your anti-inflation tactics there and leave "the interior" to its own devices. When the system starts to buckle under pressure (because you subsidize the demand but do not force the companies to invest and increase the offer), you deny it for as long as you can. And then you do something. You can imagine how close to the brink we've come if you consider the government is taking this step now, after the president's image has plunged and with a cooling economy on the horizon.

So, porteños and platenses, welcome to the rest of the country. Don't complain; you're still getting lucky.

Blackout count: 2

This is blackout #2 of the 2007 blackout season. The Power Supply Fluctuation Watch has assigned it the name Betty. Betty was a Type IIaS blackout (partial, small area, duration between 2 and 4 hours), and it was recorded in the northwest of Rosario, Argentina, beginning at about 21:30 hrs on 30 October 2007.

Blacking out from happiness!

It's so good to live in these times of economic growth, with the shopping malls full of light, and people buying around tirelessly, and the factories bustling, producing goods for the anxious consumers and for the whole world! Now, every time the power goes out, you know it's a good sign — it's just growth pains!

Or would you like to live in a country that always has energy to spare? As they say, only the mediocre are always at their best. The fact that we're having problems (which we are not) is a sign that we're doing better each day!

Now if you think otherwise, you most surely must be a neoliberal right-wing nut bent on the destruction of everything that's good about Argentina, from Sunday asados to good ol' friends' capitalism, or a poor unthinking sod deceived by the diabolic cunning of the neoliberal right-wing nuts. You're still welcome to build the country that the sensible people truly want, with us, the good guys — in fact, you're welcome to become one of us, if you have some voters that we could use.

In any case, there's something you can do to help you through the dark hours..., which means a lot of time, since you'll be often living one of those painfully glorious growth spurts when the power goes out because the power plants cannot produce, or the grid cannot handle, the tremendous amount of electricity needed to run Argentina ever-increasing productive beatitude. Just use this mantra:

There's no energy crisis... There's no energy crisis... There's no energy crisis...


Repeat ad infinitum, and you'll see the light. Eventually.

(BEST IF USED BEFORE OCTOBER 2007)

Fueling the crisis

The producers and distributors blame it on the weather being so cold; the government says it's lack of investment and speculation and repeat that, again, there's no energy crisis. But this is not enough. People are having power cuts, sometimes lasting days, because there's not enough natural gas and diesel to power the generators and because the generators are overwhelmed by the demand. Natural gas is being denied to drivers, or sold by small quotas, and now even the compressed natural gas (CNG) cylinders that many people use to heat their homes and cook are difficult to get, and fuel oil in the south of Santa Fe is rationed.

I don't have a car, I don't have to put fuel into any machine to harvest anything, and luckily I haven't had blackouts at home. I have natural gas delivered normally through the pipes, and I've used it almost continuously since last week to get some warmth. Yet I'm hearing complaints on the radio, from several parts of the city, and I'm wondering how much this luck (because this is plainly luck and nothing more) will last.

Everybody passes the blame on to someone else, yet everybody's right in a sense: each of the accused is guilty of part of the problem...

Disservice

It's a bit late given my usual blogging hours, so I'd rather be organizing an extermination campaign targetting the heads of utility companies (private, mixed and public), but that seems complicated. So here I am. Power went out twice at home, once in the morning (when I wasn't there), once just minutes ago. You'd think power cuts are not something to make a big mess of, since this Argentina, but at least EPE had an excuse back in the summer. A balmy autumn night is not a time for high electric power consumption. Unless everyone suddenly decided to turn on their split air conditioning with "HEAT" at maximum power, I suspect this was the fault of some poor rat or cockroach getting stuck inside a transformer or something like that.

Anyway, even a small blackout is an opportunity to see the city without all the usual light pollution. If there's one reason I'd like to live in the countryside, this must be it: that you can see the stars. (That's the one and only reason indeed; I'd die of boredom outside a big urban setting.) This power cut, however, was restricted to a few blocks, it seems. I managed to take a few pictures of my street, with traffic going on as usual despite the lack of visibility.


The telephone company (I have Telecom) would also deserve being targetted for extermination... I've been having a lousy Internet connection since the Great Rains. When I call my ISP, Ciudad Internet, I have to go through several minutes of corporate crap, pressing one number, then another, then being greeted by an undoubtedly well-meaning assistant-person... who's been apparently turned into a robot... and then manage to convey my problem without insults of any kind. Tests are done, notes are taken, waiting muzak is heard at intervals, and then I'm told Telecom has the complaint on file, and they'll be working on it. Telecom, of course, throws the complaint into a (virtual) trashbin. A couple of days afterwards, I'm told by a recorded voice that my Internet connection problem seems to be solved now, and that if I'm still experiencing trouble, I should let them know. Repeat.

Argentina teaches you patience, or it kills you.

Let's be nice and everything will be OK

The topics of the day in Rosario were the heat and the daily occurrence of power cuts (which, for the nth time, don't mean there is a crisis). The "official" date of the beginning of summer is 21 December (it has to do with the traditionally fixed date of the summer solstice) but nobody feels this is spring since a month ago. When the temperature goes over 27 or 28 degrees C, everyone who has access to air conditioning turns it on and cranks it up all the way. The latter can be rather unhealthy, especially during your night sleep. Personally, I haven't been granted by nature with a generous, or even appropriate, coating of insulating hypodermic fat, so I dread temperature extremes; in some places the A/C is cranked up so much that you need to put on extra clothes to avoid catching a cold.

Well, that will be no more. Luis El Halli Obeid, the head of EPE (Empresa Provincial de la Energía, the Santa Fe state power company), has resolved that, if we play nice and collaborate by not setting the A/C below 25 C, the power grid will be relieved and we won't have so many power cuts. However, Obeid went on, the heat we're experiencing now is obviously just the first taste of a hellish summer, so the worst is yet to come (yes, he literally said that), and the crisis small problems we've been suffering will only be solved by investing about 70 million pesos.

In the meantime, of course, the employees of EPE do not pay electric bills (you read right: they get electric power for free), earn fabulous salaries, and some (not many, but everybody knows there are more than a few) routinely work as private electricians "fixing" domestic power consumption meters for a nice bribe. And Luis El Halli Obeid, cousin of the provincial governor Jorge Obeid, tells us that we must be nice and sweat while they update the grid. The situation is reminiscent of Bill Gates telling us that, yes, Windows is full of security holes, and yes, we'll be catching a virus or a trojan and losing our files and our credit card numbers every now and then, and yes, it'll be worse before it gets better, so we should probably not use the computer more than one or two hours a day. The main difference in this case is that there's a Linux, but there's no alternative for EPE. If you get a portable power generator, after a few months of lowered bills EPE will send inspectors to your house to see why. The company has never apologized for the thousands of man-hours lost because of power cuts; sometimes, when a power spike destroys appliances, you can get compensation money after months of complaints, but you will never recover the money your icecream shop lost because of a three-hour blackout in the middle of January, or the data in the hard disk you lost to repeated power failures, or the hours of sleep you didn't get in a torrid summer night because you didn't have a fan, or the carefully crafted blog post that disappeared when your PC resetted itself out of the blue because some transformer blew up here or there.

The day I see Luis El Halli Obeid paying his own electric bill and sweating in his own living room, I will believe he's not just one more despicable fruit of nepotism.

There is no crisis... There is no crisis...

... the denial keeps being broadcast, on and on, like a mantra, but the fact is that our never-too-good electrical power supply is in danger. So much, that the sales of portable electrical generators have skyrocketed.

Not long ago, the article in La Capital says, only large factories, clinics and icecream parlour chains bought these generators, but as the heat starts to rise (in preparation for a summer that is bound to be hellish), power cuts are becoming common, so small businesses, office buildings and private homes are getting them as well. Manufacturers in Rosario claim they're installing 2 or 3 every day, and that they're overwhelmed by requests. Moreover, the cost of hiring a portable generator is now customarily included in the expenses of wedding parties. The other day, a downtown section of our own Icecream St. (Pellegrini Avenue) suffered a blackout that forced business to throw away hundreds of kilos of melted sweetness. The horror!

The smallest power-gen apparatuses in the market cost 2,000 pesos (US$660, €500), which is maybe twice a non-professional monthly salary. This lets you keep your lights on, plus air conditioning, a fridge, and a computer (as long as you put fuel into it, which is also expensive and in shortage).

In Santa Fe, the partly-state company EPE, which generates our low-voltage, irregular supply of over-expensive electricity, has stated that the grid will not have a crisis, but they wouldn't guarantee that there won't be blackouts this summer (unlike in 2005, 2004, 2003, and every other summer since I learned how to spell electricidad). The national government simply denies there is a crisis, and somewhat perversely, it refuses to take over-visible measures to prevent a crisis. The perverse part is that they're doing it like that because next year is election season, and the president lives by popular opinion surveys, so he doesn't want to show any weakness (including the acknowledgement that a crisis is looming), but at the same time he wouldn't tolerate public protests because of blackouts. Who understands politicians?