Blackouts Back As Heat Wave Hits Argentina

It’s blackout season again in Argentina. Yes, it’s that delightful time of the year when it gets so hot, and so many of us turn on our air conditioners, that we strain the national power grid beyond its capacity to produce and distribute electricity. The result: darkness.

Traffic lights stop working, stores and kiosks have to close their doors and discard spoiled food, and thousands of people have to take the stairs instead of the elevator.

By Thursday afternoon, the third day of a heat wave in which temperatures hovered around 100° Fahrenheit (40° C), traffic lights failed to work at 83 intersections in Buenos Aires, wreaking havoc on the city’s transit just before rush hour. Local media reported Friday that the number of lights affected had risen to almost double that figure, though a city official I spoke with couldn’t confirm this higher number.

Television stations on Friday reported a rather fantastical claim that more than 20 tons (or more than 44,000 lbs) of carp and other kinds of lake fish had died because of the heat. What? Really? But the story appears to be true. I haven’t had a chance to confirm this strange tale, but enough of my local colleagues have done so to make it credible. La Nacion quoted the mayor of Lobos, a smaller town in Buenos Aires Province: “The heat wave increases the water’s temperature and that affects the development of a kind of algae which, after being ingested, gets stuck in the bronchial tubes and causes death.” Ranchers reported that hundreds of cattle also died this week.

Planning Minister Julio De Vido said the power outages this week were the least damaging in the country’s history. He said Thursday that the blackouts had affected only a bit more than 40,000 people, compared with more than 200,000 last January, when similarly hot temperatures also strained the power grid.

The blackouts occur because Argentina’s electrical grid has not grown fast enough to keep up with the rise in demand that has occurred each year since Argentina started recovering from its 2002 economic meltdown. Since then, demand for electricity has risen about 6% annually. But for almost all of this period the government kept the price of gas and electricity frozen at below-market rates, giving energy companies little incentive to invest in improving the grid. These lower rates, which have started going up over the past few months, have helped keep the cost of living down. Indeed, while prices are starting to rise, Argentina’s energy is still among the cheapest in the world. But these lower prices – and the subsequent lack of infrastructure investment – have led to the kind of blackouts we’re experiencing now.

Will these blackouts continue to be a problem? The simple answer is yes. As long as it’s hot enough to make people sweat and turn on the AC, we’ll probably have power problems. But this summer’s blackouts may be less frequent and less severe than last summer’s because of another problem: an economic slowdown. Many economists expect the economy to enter into a recession next year. That probably means car makers and other industrial manufacturers will be producing less and, as a result, using less energy. That leaves more power for sweaty people to turn up the AC.

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