VENEZUELA: Hydropower Company Helps Set Up Co-ops around Dams

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 11 2002 (IPS) - A state-run power company in Venezuela is helping local residents of villages flooded by new dams to organise cooperatives, rather than simply compensating them for their land and other property.

The electric company, Cadafe (Compañía de Administración y Fomento Eléctrico), is building a new hydropower complex on tributaries of the Orinoco river, along the border with Colombia.

Work on the new complex got under way in 1978, to harness the hydropower potential of the Uribante, Caparo, Camburito and Doradas rivers in the Andes mountains, which flow into the huge Orinoco river.

The first plant, in San Agatón, 700 kms southwest of Caracas, began to operate in 1987, generating 300 megawatt hours. But the next phase stumbled on legal and financial problems, and on the failure of contractors to live up to their commitments.

However, work on the project has resumed, and by early next year, a new plant will begin generating an additional 480 megawatt hours.

Venezuela has a total electricity generating capacity of 20,300 megawatt hours, 86 percent of which is produced by state-owned plants interconnected by a power grid which includes infrastructure to carry energy to neighbouring Brazil, and to buy or sell electricity from Colombia.

The project, which is to cost a total of 1.19 billion dollars, will inolve the construction of four dams, three reservoirs, and three power plants with the capacity to generate 1,480 megawatt hours, the vice-president of Cadafe, Julio Carreño, explained to IPS.

”It is an alpine-style system, which gradually and repetitively harnesses, on the way downhill, the potential of the various rivers that feed into it,” said Carreño, on a tour around the area.

The new complex ”will produce a total of 5,500 megawatt hours a year, nearly nine percent of the country’s consumption needs,” he added.

High-tension 230- and 400-kilovolt power lines will carry electricity to the rest of the grid, which is also connected to Colombia, to which energy is sold mainly along the northern border, although only intermittently due to the periodic toppling of electricity pylons in Colombia by the guerrillas involved in that country’s four-decades-old civil conflict.

But further south, Venezuela purchases up to 80 megawatt hours from the Termotasajero coal-fired plant in Colombia, while both countries are putting in power lines to carry electricity to Puerto Carreño, a Colombian town on the bank of the Meta river, which forms part of the border between the two South American nations.

Venezuela also sells 200 megawatt hours to the northern Brazilian state of Roraima through a 680-km electrical line that carries power from the Guri dam in southeastern Venezuela, which generates up to 10,000 megawatt hours.

The dams that will form part of the Uribante-Caparo complex will offer a new source of energy, ”easing the pressure on the Guri dam, which harnesses the waters of the Caroní and other rivers in Venezuelaos Guayana region,” said Carreño.

This year, Cadafe began to build the La Vueltosa and Borde Seco dams on the Camburito and Doradas rivers, where a new plant will generate 480 megawatt hours. This phase of the project, which will cost 220 million dollars, is to be completed in the first quarter of 2003.

Cadafeos director of development, Blanca Tascón, underlined that ”in the current phase, we have incorporated the social element, promoting the organisation of cooperatives in communities near the hydropower complex.”

That is ”an aspect that was overlooked in the previous phase, which simply bought out peopleos land and other real estate property,” she pointed out.

Tascón cited, for example, the compensation paid to the 1,000 residents of the Andean mountain hamlet of Potosí, pointing out to IPS a small cross sticking out above the water – the cross on the local church, the only sign left of the village that lies buried beneath the waters of the reservoir.

Tascón said 61 cooperatives have been set up in the area so far this year, bringing together a total of 3,000 farmers, fisherfolk and workers in a broad range of other occupations, as well as homemakers.

The president of the cooperative Mujeres Unidas por Caparo (Women United for Caparo), Dulfa Sánchez, explained to IPS how she and 33 other women came together through ”workshops in dressmaking and the packaging and canning of food.

”Now we are setting our sights even higher, and we are planning to bid for a concession to provide our services in Cadafeos competitive bidding process,” she added.

Juana Melgarejo, with the cooperative Jardines del Caparo (Gardens of Caparo), said the aim of her group was ”to win contracts awarded as part of the dam-building process, to participate in building roads and clearing the land under the power lines.”

”What we are after is to enable the communities that have organised themselves to work in the construction and services tasks opened up by the project,” remarked Cadafe executive Claudio Aldana.

”To make that possible,” he added, ”we are helping to empower the cooperatives by facilitating contact with the state’s credit institutions, for example.”

Local fisherfolk who worked on the rivers in the area are also organising fish-farming cooperatives. Cadafe is helping them to acquire refrigerating systems and trucks for transporting the fish they raise to nearby market towns.

”The employees of the Cadafe cafeteria in the area have also set up their own cooperative, in order to participate in the bidding for the concession of the cafeteria service, in competition with their old bosses,” said Germán López, with Cadafeos citizen affairs unit.

The head of the company’s office on the environment, Carlos Sánchez, said a 200,000-hectare environmental buffer zone was created around the rivers feeding into the hydropower system.

”That does not mean it is an exclusively forested area,” said Sánchez. ”Farming activities can also be carried out there. But we have launched educational and prevention campaigns to keep the surrounding landscape from being degraded to the point that the system’s water supply is affected.”

The climate in this part of southwestern Venezuela – an area of green valleys and mountains located at 600 to 4,000 metres above sea level – ”will become cooler and more humid, and there will be more rain,” he noted.

The water flows controlled by the dams’ overflow channels will make navigation more predictable on the river system formed by the Orinoco and its largest tributary, the Apure river, which is formed by the union of the Uribante and Doradas rivers.

Tourists can already enjoy the landscape around the artificial lakes at the La Trampa camp set up on a small peninsula jutting out into one of the reservoirs.

A room in a small hotel costs just five dollars a night, while a family-sized cabin can be rented for a mere 15 dollars a day.

VENEZUELA: Hydropower Company Helps Set Up Co-ops around Dams

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 11 2002 (IPS) - A state-run power company in Venezuela is helping local residents of villages flooded by new dams to organise cooperatives, rather than simply compensating them for their land and other property.
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