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Venezuela's electricity grid is unbalanced

A total of 77 forced outages due to failures and emergencies was officially reported only in July (Photo: El Tiempo newspaper)

Economy

After describing the blackout that hit on Monday afternoon nine Venezuelan states as "a serious incident from an operational point of view," the president of the National Electric Corporation, Hipólito Izquierdo, said - from the Venezuelan southern city of Puerto Ordaz - that the outage was caused by the excessive reliance of the western electric sector on the National Interconnected System (SIN).

Besides, Caracas was using that day 1,000 megawatts of the interconnected system, more than double the normal electricity availability, because the units at the Josefa Joaquina Sánchez (Tacoa) plant were out of service.

According to Izquierdo, "we lack the generation capacity necessary to strike a balance in the Interconnected System which, whenever such failures occur, would allow the system to meet the demand by taking electricity from elsewhere in the country."


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Worsening chronic poverty in Venezuelan households

11:00 AM. Economy. Based on the official data, more and more families failed to get out of poverty in 2008; the exclusion status of more people moved faster and fewer people are on their way to overcome this situation. According to the data provided by the official National Statistics Institute (INE), last year the poorest homes in the country recorded an average monthly income of USD 401.82, whereas the food basket amounted to 417.77

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