LETTER FROM BUENOS AIRES
Suddenly, the constant murmur of electrical appliances stops. In the heat of the southern summer, the Argentineans are familiar with this sudden silence, the harbinger of a power cut that can last for days. One of them had affected 90,000 users, at the end of December 2021, in Buenos Aires and its suburbs. Once again, on Tuesday January 11, when the beating sun reached its zenith, approximately 700,000 people were without electricity, while the massive use of air conditioning during the hottest months of the year overstretched the network.
“Hi, I’m going to post a video with all the products I’m going to have to throw away because I’ve been without electricity for thirty-six hours. Okay ? », annoys a user on Twitter, calling out Edesur, the company, which, with Edenor, distributes energy in Buenos Aires and its region. Prolonged power cuts force households to give up their food reserves, frozen or refrigerated, sometimes accumulated to get ahead of inflation (nearly 51% in 2021), in a country where four in ten people live today. in poverty today.
Disabled people deprived of their elevators, traffic lights off, inability to cook or perform basic hygiene when these systems depend on electricity, unloaded computers and stalled Wi-Fi at a time when the teleworking has never prevailed so much, impossibility of getting light or getting out of the heat even with a fan: the consequences of these cuts upset the intimacy of homes and the life of neighborhoods. In Buenos Aires, residents expressed their anger by demonstrating and blocking road traffic – a common means of protest in Argentina.
These scenes are nothing new. Power outages punctuate summers in Buenos Aires and its metropolitan area. Businesses “do not carry out the work necessary to improve the service, which is expensive and bad”, says Guido Lorenzino, head of the People’s Defense of the Province of Buenos Aires, a public body supporting the interests of citizens. “It is unacceptable that every summer the same complaints about power cuts, the lack of follow-up and answers [des entreprises] repeat themselves”, added the same organization, in the city of Buenos Aires.
The price of electricity is frozen
The companies concerned point to the lack of funds to meet the necessary investment, while the price of electricity remains particularly low in Argentina. In fact, it amounts to just over five pesos for one kilowatt hour (kwH), the equivalent of 0.045 euros at the official rate, or almost four times less than in France, for comparison. But the minimum wage there is about five times lower than in France. In order to curb the effect of inflation on household budgets, the price of electricity is currently frozen in Argentina.
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