Aims to combat the South American country’s electricity crisis
HAVANA TIMES – Sweating profusely, unable to sleep because of the heat, fed up with years of blackouts several times a day, many residents of Venezuela’s torrid northwest want to cover the roofs and balconies of their homes with solar panels, and are asking the government to import them massively and cheaply from China.
“It is a proposal to break out of the quagmire immediately, to close the gap between supply and demand for electricity, 60 percent of which in Venezuela goes to residential consumption,” engineer Lenin Cardozo, one of the main promoters of the Zulia Solar and Venezuela Solar citizen initiatives, told IPS.
“The solution to the electricity problem no longer lies in thermal plants, which in Venezuela we continue to repair while they are being closed down in other parts of the world, but in new sources and technologies, such as solar power.” — Lenin Cardozo
The northwestern state of Zulia, of which Maracaibo is the capital, produced Venezuela’s great oil wealth throughout the 20th century but has become, along with the neighboring Andes region, the Cinderella of the grid that supplies electricity, generated mainly in the distant southeast of the country, bordering Brazil.
Zulia Solar emerged last year as an association to foment solutions to the lack of electricity suffered by millions of inhabitants of the region. And so far in 2024, replicas have emerged in twenty other states, with aspirations of becoming a national movement: Venezuela Solar.
Its president, lawyer Vileana Meleán, said that “the novelty is that this time the citizens are organized and we are coordinating among ourselves to present the government with this solution that arises from civil society, with a three-point proposal.”
The first point is for the government to massively import solar panels from China, the world’s leading producer – with which Caracas has developed strong commercial and political ties – in order to obtain advantageous prices, and for it to organize a distribution system that makes them affordable to households interested in installing them.
The second is that, in order to lower prices, panels, batteries and other components of solar energy systems should be made exempt from various taxes, such as customs duties and the value added tax.
And the third point calls for the creation of a public and private financing policy, with soft loans, so that families of modest means can purchase the panels and other materials required for the new installation.
The reason for the desperation
“When the electricity cuts off, the water goes out, the pumps don’t work. The food in the refrigerator spoils. During the day it is 40 or 42 degrees Celsius, but the thermal sensation reaches 47 degrees,” teacher Rita Zarate told IPS one afternoon in the hallway of her home in the working-class La Pomona neighborhood of Maracaibo.
In the last 24 hours the electricity had been cut three times, lasting between three and four hours each time.
For her family – mother, siblings, children, nieces and nephews – “the worst thing is not being able to sleep when the blackouts happen at night and in the early morning hours. In the bedroom, the heat is unbearable; outside, there are clouds of mosquitoes,” which swarm people in the house when the air conditioning or electric fans are turned off.
A sleepless night, trying to sleep when a breeze blows in the courtyard, keeping the elderly and little ones hydrated, and trying to get transportation to work at daybreak, which might not be available because the blackouts paralyze the fuel pumps and the owners of private vehicles spend hours waiting for the power to come back on so they can fill their tanks.
Zárate said that “it is the same for the children at school: classes two or three days a week, half a day, if they can run the fans. Or in the playground. Sometimes their parents leave them at home, other times the heat gets so bad that we have to send them back.”
Internet to study or to do work, to get administrative procedures done in offices, to op
