Rationing Fail

The man they call Setty continues to rock the Venezuelan blogosphere with eye-opening, new material. Today, he has this on the failure of the government’s electric rationing plan in 2010: aimed at saving 20% of our electric consumption, it managed to save just 4.2%, year on year, in January, with consumption actually ticking up slightly in February.

Worse: basically all the savings came neither from the rolling blackouts nor from the punitive surcharges on profligate users – much less through revolutionary consciousness raising – but rather through the simple expedient of shutting off the production lines at Sidor, Alcasa and Venalum: aside from EDELCA, the rest of the country’s utilities increased their power consumption.

And the biggest power felons? The Maracuchos…who else?