The superintendent of electricity, George Reinoso, told reporters yesterday that one of the fundamental problems of the electric sector is the fact that the distributors are bankrupt and have lost their lines of credit. ?And the generating sector has been de-capitalized because the distributors don?t have the cash flow to pay them, ? added Reinoso. Reinoso spoke at the Consulting Workshop on the Reform of the Dominican Electrical Sector organized by the National Energy Commission. According to the superintendent, the problem is that there has never existed an office for collecting revenues and charged with paying the generators and others down the line. Another problem brought to light by Reinoso, but not for the first time, was the fact that electricity is generated in dollars but the consumers pay in pesos, a situation aggravated by the devaluation of the peso. A further issue in the sector is the fact that credit lines have been lost with local suppliers and what is even more damaging is the loss of credit with the fuel suppliers. Now fuel must be prepaid a week in advance, which requires more capital. The electricity superintendent told his audience that the only thing the government could do was to give out incentives that would make one type of fuel more beneficial than another type. He pointed out ?that was why most of the generating plants that are coming on-line will be producing benefits within eight months.?
For Reinoso, one of the more curious problems was the fact that nobody is really sure of just what the total demand for electricity really is. According to the arithmetic of the superintendent, peak demand for each of the circuits in the system is between 1800 and 1900 megawatts (MW). If we add some 250 MW that are being generated by businesses that are disconnected from the CDEEE, plus the isolated systems, we get around 350 MW, for a total demand of 2,250 MW. Then he pointed out that there are large segments of the population that cannot pay for electricity, and another segment that treats stealing electricity as a ?sport.? This just worsens the problem, and makes things more difficult in the long run.