Just a decade ago, the small, resource-rich nation of Ecuador was embarking on a bold transition to hydroelectric power.
It was one of many South American countries betting that their abundant rivers, harnessed by dams, could satisfy growing energy needs — and help drive economic expansion, lifting millions from poverty and leading the way into a new era of prosperity.
Today, those grand designs are colliding with a warming climate.
Ecuador has been pummeled by an extraordinary drought, exacerbated by global warming, that has engulfed much of South America, drying rivers and reservoirs and putting the country’s power grid on the brink of collapse.
Since September, daily energy cuts have lasted as long as 14 hours. Highways have turned an inky black; entire neighborhoods have lost running water, even internet and cell service. One industry group says the nation is losing $12 million in productivity and sales for every hour power is out.
“My country is adrift,” said Gabriela Jijón, 46, who owns an ice cream shop outside Quito, the capital.
But Ecuador is not alone. In recent years, abnormally dry weather in places around the globe has sent rivers to extreme lows, draining hydropower resources in places like Norway, Canada, Turkey and even lush Costa Rica.
Zambia, highly dependent on hydropower, faced daily power cuts of up to 21 hours this year. Parts of China, also reliant on water for energy, suffered lengthy outages starting in 2022.
In all, more than one billion people live in countries where more than 50 percent of their energy comes from hydroelectric plants, according to Ember, a global energy research institute. Yet, as the climate warms and extreme weather events like drought become more common — and more severe — many scientists expect hydropower to become a less reliable energy source.
More than a quarter of all hydroelectric dams are in places with a medium to extreme risk for water scarcity by 2050, according to a 2022 study in the journal Water.
Ecuador is, in many ways, a bellwether for what other nations may face.
Some nations, including the United States and Ecuador’s neighbors in South America, Colombia and Brazil, have backup plans to switch to alternative sources, including fossil fuels, when hydropower runs low.
But the cost of ensuring extra energy capacity is prohibitive, and many countries are unprepared for worsening conditions, said Nicolas Fulghum, a senior analyst at Ember.
China is a growing concern, Mr. Fulghum said. In 2022 and 2023, dry conditions in the country’s southwest prompted blackouts that closed factories and severely disrupted commerce.
The country gets just 13 percent of its power from water — compared with Ecuador’s 70 percent — but because China is so large and so connected to the global economy, future droughts are likely to have “cascading effects,” Mr. Fulghum said.
In Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa, facing re-election in February, pledged recently to end power cuts this month, claiming that energy the country is purchasing from nearby Colombia, as well as other factors, would ease the power crisis.
But energy experts expect any relief to be temporary. Unless there is a deluge — about two weeks of heavy rain are needed to raise reservoir levels — regular energy outages could endure until at least 2026, said Iván Endara, a professor at the Coastal Higher Polytechnic School, an Ecuadorean university.
To truly end to the crisis, he said, years of work must be put into diversifying and building out the country’s energy sector.
The Promise of Hydropower
In 2007, a new leftist president, Rafael Correa, swept into office in Ecuador, promising to build a modernized, more socially and environmentally conscious nation.
The country had already suffered through a monthslong energy crisis in the 1990s, and then again in 2009, both prompting blackouts and caused by drought.
Responding to rising electricity demands from a growing population, and hoping to use electricity to supercharge his vision for the nation, Mr. Correa’s government invested billions of dollars to expand its energy output.
By harnessing water, not burning oil or gas, to produce electricity, this new energy matrix was supposed to help mitigate the effects of global climate change — not make Ecuador a victim of it.
Borrowing heavily from Chinese lenders, Mr. Correa’s government launched almost a dozen new hydroelectric projects, massive dams that became emblematic of the country’s transformation.
One project in particular, a $2.2 billion dam known as Coca Codo Sinclair, was plagued with design flaws, critics said, as well as allegations that some officials took bribes in exchange for awarding the dam contract to the company Sinohydro.
Yet between 2007 and 2017, when Mr. Correa left office, the country’s overall energy generation capacity rose about 60 percent, according the Ministry of Energy and Mines.
Other changes included a new constitution that eventually placed the energy sector almost entirely under state control — something critics later said led to mismanagement and inefficiency.
Most of the growth came from hydroelectricity, with some increases in fossil fuels, wind and solar capacity.
Then, when Mr. Correa left office, the capacity to generate electricity fell flat.
The former president, in an interview from his current home in Belgium, said climate change was “not the problem” at the root of Ecuador’s energy crisis.
Instead, he blamed the three governments that followed his for failing to maintain hydro and thermoelectric power plants, and faulted them for not building out other energy sources, leading to decreased capacity and the inability to keep producing electricity in adverse conditions.
“I have never seen such rapid destruction of a country in times of peace,” he said.
(Mr. Correa left Ecuador in 2017, and was convicted in 2020 on corruption charges unrelated to energy projects.)
In interviews, two of the three presidents who succeeded Mr. Correa — Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso — said that they did invest in expanding capacity, noting that energy projects often take years to come online. But both noted that they faced economic headwinds that Mr. Correa did not — first, falling oil prices that greatly contracted the country’s economy, which is highly dependent on petroleum exports.
Then came the pandemic. Mr. Lasso described his challenge as: “Do I buy vaccines or do I invest in thermoelectric plants?”
But Mr. Moreno, who took office in 2017, said the “principal” problem was the country’s “excessive focus on hydroelectric energy” which “left the system extremely vulnerable to climate change phenomena.”
Mr. Lasso, who took office in 2021, cited something else: He called Ecuador’s political culture a main driver of the crisis, describing it as shortsighted and prone to neglecting long-term solutions to major challenges — including energy security.
Representatives for the current president, Mr. Noboa, declined to comment.
The Effects of Everyday Outages
The lesson in Ecuador, said Mr. Fulghum of Ember, is not that nations should abandon hydropower, but that they should invest heavily in alternatives — preferably clean energy alternatives like wind and solar — that can compensate for water shortages.
He cited Brazil and Chile as nations that have done just that.
In Ecuador, power cuts began last year, then became daily occurrences in September, shutting businesses and sending entire industries into crisis.
Uncertainty has gripped the country, exacerbated by a booming narcotrafficking industry that has fueled violence.
Just a few years ago, Ecuador was making great strides in reducing poverty.
Now “everything that was achieved in those years of prosperity is being lost,” said Mónica Rojas, dean of economics at the University of San Francisco in Quito.
Those affected by the energy crisis include educational institutions like the Triangle Foundation, in Quito, which provides schooling and job training to people with Down syndrome, moving them into employment.
Many families are poor, and in some cases students become the primary breadwinners. Nancy de Maldonado, a founder, said getting a child into the program is “the biggest lottery” a family can win.
Yet the organization budgeted $3,000 for energy costs this year, far short of the $15,000 needed to pay for diesel to power a donated generator. Tuition may need to be raised, shutting out some of the poorest families.
In Salcedo, a town south of Quito, Ms. Jijón, the ice cream shop owner, is not the only one struggling to keep products cold.
The town lives or dies on ice cream — it has become famous for selling layered cream-and-fruit pops invented by Franciscan nuns.
But when energy cuts began, Helados de Salcedo, one of the town’s biggest companies, immediately lost tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of product, with employees watching it melt before their eyes.
Then the small shops that sell their ice creams stopped ordering — store owners couldn’t keep them cold.
By November, Paco Hinojosa, 58, the company’s general manager, figured they could survive “another three months.”
Perhaps those most deeply affected are the poorest Ecuadoreans, with no safety net.
In northern Quito one evening, the last glimmer of daylight shone in Katherine Mantilla’s bedroom. On her bed, propped on cinder blocks, Ms. Mantilla, 19, cradled her newborn daughter, Kenya, in her arms.
Kenya was born in October, a month into the energy crisis, with breathing problems. Doctors had sent her home with an oxygen tank and instructions to use it at regular intervals. But Ms. Mantilla had lost her income.
She used to sell sandwiches at traffic stops, making $8 a day. Then the stoplights went out, and people just raced through intersections, paying no mind to the young women with armfuls of snacks.
Now, Ms. Mantilla had no money to refill the oxygen tank — not even enough to buy a flashlight.
At night, she said, she was gripped by a fear that Kenya’s chest would stop rising and she wouldn’t notice.
“If she stops breathing,” said Ms. Mantilla, “if she changes color, how will I see it?”
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