Lanterns and candles became indispensable in Ecuadorian homes during the second half of 2024.
A year after the first blackouts, the country’s energy crisis was worsening. Planned power outages, which had been called due to the severe drought affecting Ecuador’s main source of electricity – hydroelectric plants – had grown from two hours a day to 14 hours a day.
No city escaped this reality. From one day to the next, Ecuador had seemingly regressed to the 18th century, as people started and finished their days without power.
Shops sold out of their stocks of uninterruptible power supply batteries and portable chargers. The noise of petrol generators became a constant feature of the soundscape around buildings, shopping centres and restaurants, where people flocked to use the internet and charge their equipment. For industries, the outages generated losses of up to USD 7.5 billion, according to the Quito Chamber of Commerce. Nationally, each hour of the blackouts was estimated to have caused economic losses of USD 12 million.
With Ecuador’s presidential election looming, experts say the problem has not been solved and will be one of the main challenges facing the winner. In the first round held on 9 February, leftist candidate Luisa González, of the Citizen Revolution Movement party, and the current centre-right president, Daniel Noboa, progressed to the second round, which will be held this Sunday, 13 April.
Both have included renewable energies in their government plans but have not elaborated on how they will implement these strategies in the face of the crisis, with their proposals light on possible solutions. The current government, meanwhile, has largely sought its answers through the expansion of fossil fuels.
A little addressed, but decisive issue
The main cause of this crisis, former energy minister Roberto Luque said in April 2024, was a severe drought, considered the country’s worst in 60 years. Rivers dried up and hydroelectric plants, responsible for about 80% of the country’s electricity, stopped working. That April – a month previously characterised by rain – brought the first power outages of the year.
“There were already very deep vulnerabilities in Ecuador’s energy and water sectors that the drought only detonated,” Homero Paltán, a researcher on climate and water risks at Oxford University, tells Dialogue Earth.
In his proposed government plan, published ahead of the elections, Noboa proposes to promote clean energy and boost renewables through public and private investment, and alliances between the two. In addition, he says his government would encourage international cooperation for research into these technologies, “facilitating the energy transition towards more sustainable sources”. In 2024, his government’s Electricity Master Plan to 2032 pitched 37 new generation projects with a capacity of 7.4 gigawatts, at a cost of over USD 10 billion.
González, meanwhile, proposes “to advance change in the energy matrix… emphasising the demand for alternative energies to encourage a change in consumption patterns”. Her 16-point plan for the energy transition also makes pledges to promote energy efficiency measures, and, similar to Noboa, to encourage public-private partnerships. However, she stresses that fossil fuels will still be used, reaffirming “energy sovereignty” over Ecuador’s resources.
The crisis has been the event that has had the most significant impact on the approval ratings of Noboa, whose tenure as president since late 2023 has been dominated by challenges around security and organised crime. According to data from the pollster Comunicaliza, on 10 April 2024, when the blackouts began, rejection of Noboa reached 35%, as opposed to 10% two months earlier in February, when there were no blackouts. When the crisis reached 14 hours of power cuts per day last October, the figure rose to almost 50%.
Hydroelectric plants at risk
Another point of González’ energy plan is to bring hydroelectric plants back under public management, following the line of former president Rafael Correa (2007–2017), who launched 14 hydroelectric projects in just a decade – although some have yet to open and others regularly break down. Noboa does not mention hydroelectric plants in his plan, but he has backed projects that had been delayed since Correa’s time, such as the trouble Toachi Pilatón.
For Paltán, the idea should not be to save the country’s hydroelectric plants, but to enhance water and energy security, including through other measures such as reducing losses or technical inefficiencies in energy transmission. Fernando Salinas, an energy analyst with nearly two decades’ experience in Ecuador’s electricity sector, explains that energy losses during distribution in the country’s grid can reach as high as 30% of generation.
According to Ecuador’s latest Energy Balance report, the electricity supply in 2023 had a contribution of 69.1% from hydroelectricity, 25.6% from thermal sources and 1.7% from other sources, with the remainder met by imports.
“If we have mostly hydroelectric power plants, the energy supply is at risk when there is a variation in flows,” Ricardo Buitrón Aguirre, a hydraulic engineer and independent energy consultant, tells Dialogue Earth.
Buitrón Aguirre explains that on the eastern slope of the country’s Andes, where there are around 4,000 MW of installed hydroelectric power in plants, such as those of the Paute Complex, the low water periods run from October to March. On the western slope, the side closer to Ecuador’s coastal cities, where there are up to 1,000 MW installed, flows decrease between June and December.
However, in April 2024, the Mazar reservoir, the largest in the country, went out of operation. Mazar has a capacity of 410 million cubic metres of water and is located in the Paute river basin, in the province of Azuay, in the Ecuadorian highlands.
Salinas tells Dialogue Earth that the country consumes around 100 gigawatt hours each day. When hydroelectric plants go out of operation, there is a deficit or a difference between demand and energy generation. During the energy crisis, a deficit of up to 30 gigawatt hours was recorded. In other words, only 70 GWh could be supplied by its generation sources.
Drought is not the only culprit
Although the focus has been on the impact of the drought, Ecuador’s energy sector faces other problems. The Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, which was inaugurated in 2016, is still not operating at 100% due to faults in its construction. At a time of blackouts, it had to close 18 times between January and June 2024 due to an accumulation of sediment behind its dam.
The 254.4 MW-capacity Toachi Pilatón plant is another project that has been repeatedly hampered, ever since the contract for its construction was signed in 2007. In December 2024, turbine three of the Alluriquín power plant, which is part of the same hydroelectric complex, was connected to the National Interconnected System (SNI), the country’s electrical grid. As it entered operation in February, President Noboa said the project was helping to “ensure that every corner of Ecuador has the energy it needs”. Two further units are set to be added in 2025.
Salinas says addressing the issue of distribution losses and improving efficiency will be one of the challenges facing the new government. In addition, and despite the goals of the electricity master plan, he says there is yet not enough investment in new electricity generation to meet demand.
According to the National Energy Balance report, electricity consumption per person in Ecuador increased by 28.8% between 2013 and 2023. “When the crisis began, I said that the blackouts were here to stay,” add Salinas. “Since then there has been no change in the dynamics of the sector and the situation has not changed.”
Fossil fuels as an immediate solution
According to the Fifth National Communication and First Transparency Report – a submission required under the United Nations’ climate convention – Ecuador has 77 operational hydroelectric plants, which generate “electricity in a sustainable and renewable way”. But Paltán sees this crisis as a challenge for the energy transition. “Being green or friendly is being put on the back burner,” he tells Dialogue Earth. One of the government’s measures, for example, was to launch a temporary exemption of all tariffs for petrol and diesel generators.
Though a temporary salve to the energy crisis, the recourse to fossil fuel sources may have brought other impacts. Studies set to be published by Rasa Zalakeviciute, a researcher at the Universidad de las Américas (UDLA), and her student Génesis Chuquimarca, will show the concentration of the pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) increased by 22% in Quito during the energy crisis, and exceeded the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) permissible levels for 24-hour concentrations. Fine particulate matter PM2.5 also increased by 5.48% and exceeded WHO levels. Exposure to PM2.5 can cause cancer and affect the cardiovascular system.
According to Zalakeviciute, the highest levels were recorded when blackouts lasted longer and there was higher usage of fossil fuel generators.
Between September 2024 and March 2025, the government has also leased three thermoelectric generation barges with a total capacity of 300 MW from the Turkish company Karpowership. The vessels cost USD 250 million. All three are operational and connected to the SNI.
Is gas the solution?
As in other parts of the world, gas has been pitched by the government as a viable alternative. Eyes have turned offshore to the Amistad Field, located in the Gulf of Guayaquil. It began producing gas in 2002 and, according to PetroEcuador, the government-owned oil company, the field can “reach a production of 94 million cubic feet per day (MMPCD), which is the operational capacity of the pipeline”. Current production is 20 million cubic feet per day from the three producing wells, which support local energy generation.
In 2023, the state explained that to increase the field’s production, a strategic partner was required. However, in September 2024, it was announced that the Amistad field would return to the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) for a renewed auction, as PetroEcuador did not have the technical knowledge to manage and develop it as the government wanted. In November, Guillermo Ferreira, vice-minister of hydrocarbons in Noboa’s government, announced that invitations had been sent to international companies, such as the Chinese group Sinopec, to participate in the tender. All of them had until 31 March to send their economic proposals.
Dialogue Earth approached MEM for comment on the status of the bidding process but received no response. The Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition also failed to respond on the status of Amistad’s environmental licence, which may need reassessment; following the expansion of a protected area, the Santa Clara reserve, in 2016, part of the field was left within its perimeter.
In the meantime, specialists consulted by Dialogue Earth fear the authorities may relax and focus less on the energy crisis as the traditional rainy season arrives in April, likely to provide some relief for the country’s hydroelectric plants. They also agreed that Ecuador’s challenges in the electricity sector could impact its international climate commitments, while a short-term focus on fossil fuel projects to prevent power cuts could be a setback that delays the country’s energy transition.
