Rómulo Ernesto Betancourt Bello, known as "The Father of Venezuelan Democracy", was the president of Venezuela, serving from 1945 to 1948 and again from 1959 to 1964, as well as leader of Acción Democrática, Venezuela's dominant political party in the 20th century.
Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. is the Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company. It has activities in exploration, production, refining and exporting oil as well as exploration and production of natural gas. Since its founding on 1 January 1976, with the nationalization of the Venezuelan oil industry, PDVSA has dominated the oil industry of Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter.
Since 2 February 1999, Venezuela saw sweeping and radical shifts in social policy, moving away from the last governments officially embracing a free-market economy and liberalization reform principles and towards income redistribution and social welfare programs.
Endesa, S.A. is a Spanish multinational electric utility company, the largest in the country. The firm, a majority-owned subsidiary of the Italian utility company Enel, has 10 million customers in Spain, with domestic annual generation of over 97,600 GWh from nuclear, fossil-fueled, hydroelectric, and renewable resource power plants. Internationally, it serves another 10 million customers and provides over 80,100 GWh annually. Total customers numbered 22.2 million as of December 31, 2004. It also markets energy in Europe. The company has additional interests in Spanish natural gas and telecommunications companies.
CANTV is the state-run telephone and internet service provider in Venezuela. It was one of the first telephone service enterprises in the country, founded in 1930. The largest telecommunications provider in Venezuela, it was privatized in 1991, and re-nationalized in 2007 by Hugo Chavez.
The Comisión Federal de Electricidad is the state-owned electric utility of Mexico, widely known as CFE. It is the country's dominant electric company, and the country's second most powerful state-owned company after Pemex. The Mexican constitution states that the government is responsible for the control and development of the national electric industry, and CFE carries out this mission. The company's slogan is "Una empresa de clase mundial".
Venezuela has the largest conventional oil reserves and the second-largest natural gas reserves in the Western Hemisphere. In addition Venezuela has non-conventional oil deposits approximately equal to the world's reserves of conventional oil. Venezuela is also amongst world leaders in hydroelectric production, supplying a majority of the nation's electrical power through the process.
The electricity sector in Bolivia is dominated by the state-owned ENDE Corporation, although the private Bolivian Power Company is also a major producer of electricity. ENDE had been unbundled into generation, transmission and distribution and privatized in the 1990s, but most of the sector was re-nationalized in 2010 (generation) and 2012.
The electricity sector in Argentina constitutes the third largest power market in Latin America. It relies mostly on thermal generation and hydropower generation (36%). The prevailing natural gas-fired thermal generation is at risk due to the uncertainty about future gas supply.
Enel Generación Chile S.A., formerly known as Endesa Chile and Empresa Nacional de Electricidad, is the largest electric utility company in Chile. It was created as a subsidiary of the state-owned CORFO on 1 December 1943 and was privatized in 1989. As of April 2009, it is owned by Enersis with a 60% stake, which in turn is 61% owned by Endesa International SA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Spanish Endesa Group. Besides Chile, the Company has investments in Argentina, Colombia and Peru. It also has unconsolidated equity investments in companies engaged primarily in the electricity generation, transmission and distribution business in Brazil. Endesa Chile owns a 51% stake in the controversial HidroAysén project in Aisén Region, which would build 5 hydropower dams on two of Chile's largest wild rivers, the Baker and the Pascua. As of the 17 December 2009, Jorge Rosenblut has been the President of Endesa. Enel has signed a contract to deliver renewable power to SCM Minera Lumina Copper Chile starting in January 2021.
Venezuela uses the UTC−04:00 time offset, and they had previously used UTC−04:30 from 9 December 2007 until 30 April 2016. The time is commonly called Venezuelan Standard Time (VET), and legally referred to as Hora Legal de Venezuela (HLV) or Venezuela's Legal Time. The HLV is administered by the Navigation and Hydrography Service, in the Cagigal Naval Observatory, Caracas.
Red Eléctrica de España is a partly state-owned and public limited Spanish corporation which operates the national electricity grid in Spain, where it operates the national power transmission system. It also holds assets in Peru, Chile and Brazil.
Electricity in Paraguay comes almost entirely from hydropower. As Paraguay is landlocked and has no significant natural gas reserves, its citizens often burn firewood which contributes to deforestation. The government imports fuel to use, and state-owned Petróleos Paraguayos (Petropar) has a monopoly on all crude oil and petroleum product sales and imports in Paraguay. It operates Paraguay's sole refinery, the 7,500 bbl/d (1,190 m3/d) Villa Elisa facility.
The electricity sector in Venezuela is one of the few in the world to rely primarily on hydroelectricity, which accounted for 64% in 2015.
Derwick is a Venezuelan energy company specializing in the construction of turn-key power plant projects. According to The Wall Street Journal, Derwick Associates "was awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts in little more than a year to build power plants in Venezuela shortly after the country's power grid began to sputter in 2009".
Mauricio García Araujo was a Venezuelan economist who worked in both the private and public sectors. He was the president of the Central Bank of Venezuela between 1987 and 1989 during the presidency of Jaime Lusinchi (1984-1989).
Renewable energy in Costa Rica supplied about 98.1% of the electrical energy output for the entire nation in 2016. Fossil fuel energy consumption in Costa Rica was 49.48 as of 2014, with demand for oil increasing in recent years. In 2014, 99% of its electrical energy was derived from renewable energy sources, about 80% of which from hydroelectric power. For the first 75 days of 2015, 100% of its electrical energy was derived from renewable energy sources and in mid 2016 that feat was accomplished for 110 consecutive days despite suboptimal weather conditions.
Nationwide recurring electrical blackouts in Venezuela began in March 2019. Experts and state-run Corpoelec sources attribute the electricity shortages to lack of maintenance and to a lack of technical expertise in the country resulting from a brain drain; Nicolás Maduro's administration attributes them to sabotage. Since March, various nationwide blackouts occurred in the country.
Venezuela has experienced a marked deficit in the generation of electrical energy. The immediate cause of the energy crisis was a prolonged drought that caused the water in the reservoir of the Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant to reach very low levels. Although various measures were taken to overcome the crisis, one of the most controversial was the implementation of a program of electrical rationing throughout the country, except in the capital Caracas, which was ultimately officially suspended in June 2010, due to the recovery of reservoirs due to the rains, and not to interrupt the transmission of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Power cuts have continued to occur in the interior of the country, although with less frequency and duration, this time driven by failures in other parts of the system. The situation of "electrical emergency" decreed by the government on 21 December 2009 was suspended on 30 November 2010; however, on 14 May 2011, after the country experienced two national blackouts, the government of Hugo Chávez announced a temporary rationing plan and acknowledged that the electricity system continued to face "generation weaknesses" that they did not expect to surpass until end the year.
US$835.5 million (2008)
- US$140.1 million (2008)
