O que realmente se passa com a eletricidade venezuelana?

Uma sucessão de posts no Twitter por Anatoly Kurmanaev, condensados aqui:

I went to the heart of Venezuela’s transmission system in Guarico to try to find out what’s going on with the grid. Here’s why partial blackouts are unfortunately likely to persist for a while. I sincerely hope I’m wrong. (...)

San Geronimo B is not working because it’s not getting sufficient (if any) current from Guri. That’s the scariest part. It provides evidence that the government is far from successfully restarting its turbines.

What caused the Guri failure? Corpoelec union leader Ali Briceño said it was brush fire under the 765 KV trunkline which caused a surge in the system and caused Guri to shut down. There are no skilled operators left there to restart it. (...)

Briceno’s theory is “possible but not probably,” said one of the people who built that trunkline. Fire would’ve had to occur in a relatively small stretch, between Guri & the first 765 KV substation, Malena, for that to happen. (...)

Most people I talked to say the problem had to occur inside Guri’s turbines themselves. And that’s a scary thought. If they are damaged, they will be very hard to replace or repair. No money or skilled people.

One Corpoelec manager said after the blackout a Guri operator told him “the turbines are failing,” before hanging up. He hasn’t been able to reach anyone there since. Sebin is a constant menace.

And without Guri, it’s Mad Max.

The government’s failure to present a coherent explanation is only raising my fears that something really bad has happened.

Eu confesso que li a thread toda e fiquei sem perceber o que era exatamente esse "Guri" que tinha falhado e cujo falhança fazia que a sub-estação San Gerónimo B também não funcionasse (imaginei que fosse alguma central elétrica com turbinas), mas indo ao Google rapaidamente percebi que é uma central hidroelétrica (imagino que isso fosse conhecimento comum para qualquer pessoa interessada em assuntos venezuelanos e por isso Kurmanaev não achou necessário explicar).

Ainda sobre isso, Venezuela's electrical collapse, por James Bosworth:

The electrical outage in Venezuela is almost certainly caused by a lack of maintenance and personnel. The system has been on the verge of collapse for years. The fact this collapse didn’t happen sooner says something about the resilience of certain legacy systems and the ingenuity of a few brilliant workers who sometimes duct taped stuff together to keep it running. (...)

That final point about communications has become absolutely critical to the ongoing political clash. Guaido’s people have lost much of their capabilities to coordinate protests and actions across the country. Maduro has lost his ability to communicate with security forces and the security forces are limited in how they can communicate with each other. The lack of communications increases the potential for mistakes on all sides.. (...)

The failures of the electrical system and all the cross-connected CI systems points at some major challenges for the next Venezuelan government. Maduro’s people may get a temporary fix in place in the coming days, but the fragility and lack of resilience in the system has been laid bare. This is a problem that requires billions in investment, from the turbines at Guri to the generators at hospitals, not a simple fix of a transmission line.

Faced with a full electrical system collapse, the country should try to leapfrog technology and get solar and battery backup systems into microgrids around the country to build something much less centralized and more resilient. That may seem like magical thinking today given the multiple overlapping tragedies that are occurring right this moment, but this is a big problem that needs big and ambitious solutions.