25APR24- For more than a year, Ecuador has been seeking to contract new electricity, through land-based generators or barges, to face its electricity crisis, but it has not materialized. The first offer came in March 2023 when Fernando Santos was serving as Minister of Energy in the government of Guillermo Lasso.

The proposal was from the Turkish company Karpowership, owner, operator and builder of the Powership fleet of ships, which former minister Santos defines as "floating power plants." Each of these generating ships has an installed power of between 30 megawatts to 470 megawatts , according to Karpowership on its website.

Why didn't it come to fruition? Former Energy Minister Fernando Santos said there were two obstacles. The first was budgetary. According to former Minister Santos, the companies demanded that funds be allocated to ensure payment of the electricity rate, for example, a trust, and thus avoid State arrears. Only the Turks asked Ecuador to make an advance payment of $80 million

to cover three months of service and the cost of transporting one of their barges from Cuba to the Ecuadorian coast. And not even the state holding company CELEC, which is the largest electricity generator in Ecuador, had that money; nor the Empresa Eléctrica Quito, which was later in charge of the contracting process, Santos said.

The second obstacle, according to Santos, was the delays involved in obtaining environmental permits to bring the barge and to install the engines on land. This is because the substations where the electrical solutions had to be installed had old environmental licenses, which had to be updated, which was going to take several months. There were only three sites, according to Santos, to install the generators, with connections for transmission lines. One was the Isla Trinitaria substation, where a barge could be connected.

This substation had an extra capacity to install up to 230 megawatts. On the other hand, at the Quevedo substation there was a capacity of 130 megawatts for ground engines and at Salitral, a capacity of 100 megawatts also for ground generators. So, the current maximum capacity that can be contracted in new generation is 460 megawatts, but "payment and environmental permits need to be ensured, two obstacles that complicated the previous administration," Santos said...." -

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