The director of the Broad Front in UTE, Fernanda Cardona, assured that a greater frequency in power cuts and for longer periods are a direct consequence of cuts in investments and maintenance, since the workforce is at “a historical minimum” , according to the hierarch said to the portal M24.
Cardona affirms that, “if one looks at the UTE documents, in reality the management line and the technical reports still do not reflect, in the large numbers, the reality that people have been noticing at home, with more frequent cuts and more in the cut-off time ”.
For the opposition representative in the body, this is due to a reduction in the number and value of investments and a reduction in personal income. “We have a historical workforce due to the very low level of the workforce, we reached June 2021 with less than six thousand employees (…) vacancies have been eliminated, especially in income and operations, which are going to be essential from now on. There are places in Uruguay that do not support the reality that they have as personnel ”.
In the dark
On October 12, a major power outage affected 63,000 UTE clients in Montevideo. According to the entity, it was due to “the failure of a transformer” and it reached the Cordón, Tres Cruces, Parque Batlle, Figurita and Pocitos Nuevo neighborhoods. The problem triggered chain failures at five stations. In the affected areas, not only were houses and businesses interrupted, but the public thoroughfare was also left in darkness.
“That the electricity should not be cut” is one of the premises of the board of directors for the current period, according to what the UTE Distribution Manager, Luis Cataldo, had said in a conference with rural producers in September at the Expo Prado. “The number of cuts is a very relevant aspect. Of course, it is not the same that (the light) is cut seven times, and that it is seven times two minutes, seven times 10 hours ”, he commented.
Cataldo said on that occasion that there is an issue that is being evaluated: electricity micro-cuts. They are those interruptions that do not last more than three minutes but that cause “an important distortion in many productive activities that require continuity”, such as those related to the creation of electronic or digital products.
These micro-cuts are not accounted for by the Regulatory Unit for Energy and Water Services (Ursea), so they do not appear in the statistics even though they can cause production problems.
In conversations with the weekly search, in September, the representative of the Cabildo Abierto in UTE, Enrique Pées Boz, assured that these electrical micro interruptions are “voltage sags” that mainly affect consumers in the center-south of the country. “You don’t see the tension gaps. The lamp does not flicker, but an oscillation occurs that hurts a computer, “he said.
