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.

Vacations: Neuquén: Swimming near the dinosaurs

The day after we arrived in Neuquén, we took a little Cono Sur bus to Villa El Chocón, a town beside the Ezequiel Ramos Mexía reservoir, best known as simply El Chocón, which is the name of the dam rather than the lake. El Chocón is a dam on the Limay River, with a 1,200 MW hydroelectric power plant, the largest in Patagonia.

We had two reasons to go there: one, Villa El Chocón has a paleontogical museum, with a small sample of fossils, the star being a reconstruction of Giganotosaurus carolinii, found in Neuquén and advertised as "the largest terrestrial carnivore in the history of Earth", though the more recently found Spinosaurus now seems to bear that title.

The second reason was the reservoir itself. The lake is an impressive sight, so much emerald water in an otherwise arid landscape, and man-made on top of that. We had to walk a couple of kilometers along the shore, and we came to the "beach resort", which is just an expression because there was no beach, properly speaking, on our side; you just had to climb down the rocks, three or four meters, until you got near the water, and pick a spot where you could leave your stuff.

It was now really hot, at 3 PM in the sun, surrounded by all that rock and sand, so after a short while we all got into the water, which was (no kidding) just above freezing point — remember these are the waters of a river that flows from thawing ice up in the Andes.

I'm no good at swimming and I feared a could get cramps from the cold, but I took the plunge and then followed the coast, stopping from time to time to test the rocks at the bottom and enjoy the cool. When I looked back, my two friends were waving at me from the other side of our branch of the lake, maybe 100 meters away. Being more-or-less in shape, they swam back quickly, though they complained that the cold water made their ears hurt.

We climbed up to the road after a while, and sat on a bar with a couple of beers. We had plenty time before the last bus came, so we walked along the shore of the reservoir until we could see the dam.

Then we came back and sat on the bus stop. We had bought our return tickets in advance, but there were many other people there who hadn't, so when the bus came, we got in and took our seats first, and the driver waited until the bus was full, and left.

The trip was hellish. The bus was packed, it was hot (around 30 degrees I guess), there was no air conditioning, and the windows were jammed. And this was no short trip; it was 82 km and took an hour and a half on a road that was, mercifully, in good condition.

That night we got our bags ready, and got prepared to leave for Junín de los Andes, our next stop, early in the morning.

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.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Since there is no energy crisis, today's blackout must have been caused by other factors... Maybe a rat chewed on a powerline or something. That has happened. Whatever the reason, 43,000 people were left without power today when part of a power plant in the downtown exploded around 10 PM. Destiny had such a fine aim at me that this came more or less around the time when I was just about to conduct some business on floor #15 of a certain building. News: sedentary work is bad for your physical fitness. If you haven't been jogging or otherwise exercising your legs and your aerobic capacity, climb the stairs slowly or you might die amid painful panting.

Again, this is not part of any hypothetical "energy crisis". It's just a coincidence that blackouts are becoming more and more frequent lately, and even worse as summer approaches and people start turning on their air conditioning. Really.

Seriously: At most, we must concede that the power company guys' denial is not groundless. Part of this is not caused by a higher demand of electric power, but by sheer neglect and incompetence.