Today’s Hoy newspaper contains a piece by electrical engineer Luis Arthur, who criticizes President Leonel Fernandez’s decision to purchase two used coal plants that would supply 600 megawatts. This deal was carried out behind closed doors, without transparency, and ignoring the comments made by the country’s qualified electricity technicians as well as the people who pay for so many follies, he writes. “It is a shame that the same people who negotiated the Cogentrix power plant, that is non-operational, and that costs us US$45 million a year, are again our saviors,” he writes with irony, while asking if these old generators are so good, why they haven’t be subject to public scrutiny?”
Arthur explains that the reason why power is so expensive in the DR is that while there is sufficient generation capacity, the government needs to secure the funds to pay the international organizations that lent the money for the power plants, and thus the extra burden on the Dominican people in the form of high power rates. He says that the distributors have a profit margin of 110.18%, given that they have been authorized to charge consumers that pay their bills for their own inefficiencies, which he calls “simply an abuse.”
See http://www.luis.arthur.net/publicaciones/…