Oh me, oh my, things are really starting to get dire now! While parts of Russia are under water and Dubai has been hit by floods too, we here in Ecuador are yearning for some rain. In week 46 of last year, I wrote another column about El Niño and the accompanying drought and electricity rationing. But things are getting distinctly unpleasant. The weather has been extremely hot and dry for six months now, and the end does not seem to be in sight yet.
‘Abril, aguas mil’, the famous Ecuadorian saying goes. Loosely translated, it means: ‘April, rain it will’, indicating that this is usually the wettest month of the year. Not so this time! The water shortage in the hydropower plants is so acute now, that we are getting cut off from the grid for eight hours a day. Even school have been forced, by ministerial decree, to shut their doors and send the pupils home. Yup, yet again!
After the indigenous uprisings, Covid and the state of emergency due to drug-related violence, this is the umpteenth time in the last five years that the kids are forced to stay at home. Those droughts are of course nobody’s fault, but that the energy policy needs reforming is blatantly obvious. Each year, the government spends no less than 3 billion euros on useless subsidies on diesel, gasoline and gas. If only they invested this kind of money in alternative energy sources, such as wind parks and solar panels, so that the rationing of electricity might become a thing of the past.