Exacerbated by climate change, events such as droughts, fires and floods are bringing blackouts and threatening energy security, sparking a search for solutions.
When the blackouts began, Diego Torres anticipated disaster: “A tremendous crisis came upon us.” Ecuador, his home country, had been severely affected by an unusual drought, one which reduced river and watershed levels, in turn disrupting the electricity grid in a country heavily dependent on hydropower. What followed was a turbulent period of energy shortages that disrupted millions of lives.
Ecuador began rationing electricity in September 2024. A series of power outages in the months since has repeatedly left neighbourhoods across the country in the dark. It has also destabilised the provision of drinking water and the internet, and caused significant economic losses to thousands of businesses.
“The blackouts lasted between eight and 14 hours a day. The power was cut off at 8pm and came back on the next day in the morning. We had to stop working; everything stopped,” laments Torres, an engineer in the highland city of Cuenca.
In December, Ecuador’s then-finance minister, Juan Carlos Vega, said the economic impact of the energy crisis was estimated to represent approximately 1-1.5% of national GDP.
Though hydropower has long accounted for the majority of Ecuador’s electricity generation, its share has grown greater during the past decade, reaching over 75% in 2023, according to data from the energy think-tank Ember. In times of heavy rainfall, hydropower plants can supply up to 90% of total domestic demand. But with the drought, Ecuador began to suffer an energy capacity deficit of 1,080 megawatts, equating to roughly 20% of the country’s total installed hydropower.
“Ecuador was prepared at the time for climatic phenomena that generate periods of drought,” says René Ortiz, Ecuador’s former Minister of Energy and Renewable Resources. “In the past decade, alternative renewable energy sources, such as thermal and photovoltaic, have been installed in the country. But much of the equipment was not maintained, because during the pandemic that began in 2020, the budget previously allocated to it had to be directed to social and health demands.
“It was believed this machinery that was installed could come in instantly to make up for the [power] shortage, but it was not ready. Time and shortages came upon us. The blackouts came upon us.”
A regional struggle
Severe power outages are becoming increasingly common in Latin America. According to a recent study by the Latin American Energy Organization (Olade), extreme events such as droughts, fires and floods – all exacerbated by climate change – are reducing the efficiency of electricity systems and threaten regional energy security. And in the context of increased pressure on power generation and distribution in the region, flexible and sustainable long-term solutions are paramount.
In May 2024, the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul experienced one of the biggest floods in the country’s history. It displaced more than 600,000 people and left hundreds injured. In cities such as Porto Alegre, the state capital, most of the electricity system collapsed. This left 138,000 without electricity and cut off power to water drainage pumps. The streets became rivers, flooded by heavy rains and a lagoon adjacent to the city.
Elsewhere, in May last year, a heat wave caused widespread energy chaos in Mexico, due to an unsustainable increase in demand. It left 18 of the country’s 32 states without electricity.
At the same time, the arrival of summer in Argentina caused energy destabilisation and power outages in several provinces. This led Javier Milei’s government to announce the Summer Plan 2024-2025, featuring Brazilian energy imports and increased hydropower supplies from the Yacyretá dam on its border with Paraguay.
Meanwhile, a sequence of hurricanes destabilised Puerto Rico during 2024. Among them was Hurricane Ernesto, which ravaged the US territory in August, knocking out grids and leaving around 700,000 households without power. In 2017, Hurricane Maria destroyed much of the electricity grid and the island continues to struggle in that aftermath. At the very end of last year, nearly 90% of Puerto Rico was without power, after an underground power cable failed and triggered a wider system shutdown.
“Extreme weather events have been a very present reality in recent years and are breaking more and more records around the world,” says the renowned Brazilian climatologist, Carlos Nobre. He attributes these events to the rise in global temperatures that are generating climate change: “We notice that our cities are experiencing a synergistic integration between global warming and land change.”
A risky dependence on hydropower?
Decades of efforts to diversify energy sources beyond oil and gas have led many Central and South American countries to extensively exploit their greatest resource: water. Dozens of hydroelectric plants were built on key hydrographic reservoirs in the region, such as the Itaipu plant in Brazil, or Guri in Venezuela.
While these plants once solved a problem, rising energy demand and climate change have put such systems in check. According to Nicolas Fulghum, a senior analyst for Ember who specialises in global energy data, there has always been a crucial connection between the climate crisis and power generation. This is particularly the case for nations that are highly dependent on hydro: “Hydropower has historically been linked to climate conditions, but also to saturation. The problem we are seeing now is that plants built in the past are located in regions where conditions have changed. A region that 40 years ago received heavy rainfall may now be experiencing the opposite. And power plants are becoming less efficient.
“It is difficult to know if this pattern will continue in the coming years, but we are seeing more drought events, for example, in Brazil, Ecuador and China, which has affected power generation in those countries. This is not a new phenomenon, but its severity is much greater in those regions.”
Energy security and resilience
According to the International Energy Agency, the world could see a 25-30% growth in electricity demand by 2030. And in an economic and environmental climate geared towards sustainable development, the global challenge will be to meet this demand while avoiding sources that contribute to global heating. But when disruptions to electricity systems occur in the midst of extreme weather events, affected nations – Brazil or Ecuador, for example – tend to increase their imports of oil- and diesel-powered generators to stabilise energy supplies.
Sustainable development is a bittersweet goal for countries in the Global South. Their transitions to a “green” economy are typically complicated by insufficient resources and disagreements over subsidies in negotiations with developed countries.
For the specialists interviewed by Dialogue Earth, the only way to guarantee energy security in Latin America – and the rest of the world – is to create more integrated, balanced energy grids that can cope with extreme weather. Daniela Cardeal, president of the Renewable Industry Union in southern Brazil, says there has been no more crucial time in recent decades to transition energy sources, “which in turn will improve our relationship with the earth and provide energy security for communities”.
“We have two distinct problems,” says Fulghum. “Increased use of fossil fuels during droughts and an increased need for energy capacity. When there is a balance of energy supplies, with a lot of wind and solar power, it is possible to use these reserves in times of drought, which reduces dependence on fossil fuels and the international market. A country that is more insulated from these problems is more resilient to energy shortages.”
Fitzgerald Cantero, director of studies, projects and information at Olade, says distributed power generation and storage systems are a possible solution to these problems. But securing financing for the high input costs remains a barrier: “Storage plants play a fundamental role in the accumulation of sources that are intermittent [such as wind and solar]. The possibility of storing this energy makes it possible to improve the regulation of the systems for these intermittent sources, and to reduce the discharge of energy during periods of low demand.”
Cantero says decentralised and distributed power generation is a very good option from a local point of view. It increases energy coverage and reduces energy losses to isolated areas that can be difficult and costly to power via the grid.
“It is a question of energy security and flexibility,” says Fulghum. “Increasing generation capacity can really help mitigate these climate-imposed challenges, particularly in countries that are highly dependent on few energy sources.” He believes that, with the significant drop in input prices for wind and solar, these alternative solutions will be able to expand further in Latin America.
“The energy transition has to be urgent,” Nobre warns. “If we fail to stabilise the global temperature level by eliminating our CO2 emissions by 2050, the challenge of reducing emissions will become the greatest we have ever faced on this planet. We will be committing ecocide.”
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