Colombia Faces a $50 Million an Hour Blackout Risk, and Has Built Almost Nothing to Stop It

Vice president-elect José Manuel Restrepo put a number on catastrophe last month: a Colombian blackout would cost the economy roughly 204 billion pesos, or about $50 million USD, for every hour the lights stay dark^[1]. He delivered the figure publicly, weeks before taking office in August, after meeting with energy-industry leaders. The calculation was not idle speculation. It was a warning with arithmetic.

Colombia's electricity system is a single point of failure with a name: water. Hydroelectric dams supply the vast majority of the country's power in normal years, which means a severe dry spell becomes a grid emergency overnight. That dry spell has arrived. The El Niño weather pattern has begun, forecasters give it a very high chance of turning severe into early 2027, and across twenty-three of Colombia's thirty-two departments, water scarcity is already acute^[7]. Reservoir levels are falling daily. Fossil fuel plants, which have surpassed 50 percent of effective generation as hydro withers, are already operating near their capacity limits^[7]. And here is the mechanism that makes the crisis real: of the 4,475 megawatts of new generation capacity promised for 2026, only about 7 percent has begun commercial operation^[1].

This is not an engineering problem wearing a policy mask. It is a policy problem that engineering cannot solve in the time remaining. Colombia's grid-development timelines have slipped for years. Renewable projects, solar and wind farms that could have diversified the energy mix and insulated the system from hydrological shock, languished in permitting, financing, and land-rights tangles while the government relied on the assumption that wet years would come. They did not come when needed. Now the incoming administration faces a choice it did not make: coordinate an emergency response before August, or enter office managing rationing and blackout risk^[1].

The pattern is not unique to Colombia. Ecuador experienced nationwide blackouts in late September 2024 and again in 2023, as a historic drought and an 18 percent drop in domestic electricity production collided with an energy system that had no buffer^[8]. Both countries built their grids on the assumption that hydropower's low marginal cost and climatic resilience in wetter decades would hold. Neither invested adequately in diversification when the window to build was open. Climate change has increased hydrological variability across the region; a grid built for the climate of 1990 cannot run on the climate of 2026^[8].

The outage risk carries costs beyond the macroeconomic number. Power outages disrupt water treatment, hospital function, telecommunications, cold-chain food storage, and heating or cooling for vulnerable households^[2]. Those costs accrue fastest to the people with the least buffer: the uninsured, the sick, the poor. A rational policy response would have been to build generation diversity, solar, wind, smaller hydro, storage, when the investment had room to mature. The rational response now is to do it anyway, acknowledging the compression of the timeline, and to pair it with demand management, emergency interconnections with less-stressed neighbors, and transparent rationing rules if they become necessary.