Santo Domingo.- Citizen Participation denounced on Wednesday a persistent structural deterioration in the National Electric Sector and demanded effective actions with transparency to resolve this crisis.
He indicated that this crisis has caused blackouts of more than 12 hours a day from August to date, making this summer a “hell” for families and the popular economy, generating large damage and generalized protests.
The organization argued that despite investments greater than RD $ 2,000 million in substations and official promises to solve the problem before the end of 2025, reality reflects a persistent structural deterioration.
“According to official data from the Ministry of Energy and Mines, between January and August 2025, the Dominican Government allocated more than RD $ 62,000 million to the electricity subsidy, a figure that represents around 60% of the state subsidies executed in this period. This proportion exceeds investments in strategic sectors such as health and social programs,” he said.
However, it emphasized, energy losses increased by 36.9% in 2024 to 37.6% in 2025. This means that for each RD $ 100 inverted, near RD $ 38 are lost due to fraud, illegal connections and technical deficiencies.
He argued that as of September 2024, the Ministry of Energy and Mines reported more than 800,000 illegal connections to the interconnected national electrical system (SENI), equivalent to 25% of formal clients. Although as of August 2025 this figure descended to 650,000, the number remains alarming and represents one of the main sources of system losses.
“The knowledge in detail of how mafias of public officials, relatives of politicians and companies created for such purposes, who have stolen billions of pesos and dollars and have submitted this country to the constant suffering of long blackouts and the Dominican economy and the large losses for this concept have been installed,” he said.
According to citizen participation, the cyclical persistence of the electrical crisis is also due to the immensity of fraud in consumption, both from the population and also of powerful sectors; The inability to bill what is served and serious failures in internal control systems, governance and transparency of distributing companies (EDES).
“The impact of these irregularities is reflected with rawness in the official figures: between January and May 2025, the EDES registered losses of 41.7% of the electricity supply. In that sense, we warn that the recent decree 517-25, which declares in emergency key aspects of the electricity sector, must be applied with strict institutional controls. The national experience demonstrates that the states of exception Emergency, if they are not accompanied by independent transparency and inspection, have historically been fertile terrain for waste and corruption, “said the entity.
Consequently, he urged the government and control agencies to ensure that this provision does not become a new channel of undue privileges and overvaluations to the detriment of citizenship.
Citizen participation demands the Government to adopt urgent measures, among which are:
- Transparent to EDES: Publish Execution Reports, Operational Indicators and Financial Statements.
- Depolitize the electricity sector: due to the magnitude of its operations and the little transparency with which it has been handled, this sector has been refuge and free field for corruption, the use of political activists and influence peddling.
- Independent audits: carry out external reviews of energy purchase contracts, loss management, investments in edes and fraud detected, such as the case of Edeeste.
- Subsidy review: redefine the subsidy policy, prioritizing focused schemes such as Luz Bonus through SIUBEN, so that resources reach vulnerable homes and not to unsustainable operational deficits.
- Loss reduction plan: Establish annual goals with multisectoral monitoring, guaranteeing that investments in generation and distribution have verifiable results.
- Fight against fraud: intensify regularization campaigns, incorporate advanced measurement technology, apply effective sanctions and bring justice to those responsible for electrical fraud.
