Venezuela's electricity grid is unbalanced

After describing the blackout that hit on Monday afternoon nine Venezuelan states as 'a serious incident from an operational point of view,' the president of the National Electric Corporation, Hipólito Izquierdo, said - from the Venezuelan southern city of Puerto Ordaz - that the outage was caused by the excessive reliance of the western electric sector on the National Interconnected System (SIN). Besides, Caracas was using that day 1,000 megawatts of the interconnected system, more than double the normal electricity availability, because the units at the Josefa Joaquina Sánchez (Tacoa) plant were out of service. According to Izquierdo, 'we lack the generation capacity necessary to strike a balance in the Interconnected System which, whenever such failures occur, would allow the system to meet the demand by taking electricity from elsewhere in the country.'