
Next week, the entire country will experience power outages regardless of their energy provider. In other words, although a good part of Guanacaste and the peninsular cantons are supplied by Coopeguanacaste instead of the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE), no one will be exempt from the rationing planned between Monday, May 13 and Friday, May 17.
The cooperative still isn’t certain of the times when each community will experience blackouts. “ICE told us that they wouldn’t be able to inform us until Saturday, [May 11] about the need for power to be suspended starting Monday. At the co-op, we’re prepared with different scenarios,” Yuri Alvarado, Coopeguanacaste’s distribution manager, explained to The Voice.
When talking about “scenarios,” Alvarado was referring to the fact that there are variables regarding the outages, from how many and which communities will experience them each day, to the schedules.
Each rationing will last two to three hours, Alvarado specified, in the time period from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and until 10 p.m., even though ICE had reported that the outages will only occur during the day. Several companies have already reported their outages and they will also occur at night.
Of course, rationing will not occur on the lines that supply health services, which, in the case of Coopeguanacaste, are the public clinics of Paquera, Jicaral, Santa Cruz, Filadelfia and La Anexión Hospital. Therefore, the neighborhoods around these health centers won’t experience power outages either.
The manager also added that “unforeseen events can occur along the way,” like the ones that left several communities in the country without power yesterday due to a failure in a generating plant.
We hope that’s not the case,” he said, “but if an emergency of this type happens, it’s possible that additional discharges are made that we’re not contemplating at this time.”
Coopeguanacaste buys between 60 and 65% of the energy it distributes to ICE. The rest they generate themselves or get from the National Consortium of Electrification Companies (Spanish acronym: Coneléctricas).
How do I find out about the outages?
Coopeguanacaste will give details about the rationing on the website suspensiones.coopeguanacaste.com and through their social networks, as well as with messages to telephone numbers registered by subscribers.
In the case of ICE, you can review the information at grupoice.com or on their Facebook page.
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