In April 2024, in the middle of the worst drought Ecuador had recorded in sixty years, the lights went out — not in the manner of a storm, all at once and back by morning, but administratively, on a schedule, fourteen hours a day, as a hydro fleet built to supply three quarters of the country’s electricity ran down to barely thirty per cent of its capacity and the state began rationing what remained.
The reservoirs behind Coca Codo Sinclair and the Paute cascade had not been struck by anything; they had simply not been rained on, month after month, while the El Niño of 2023–24 rearranged the continent’s water.
By the time the episode closed, Ecuador’s own central bank had tallied the cost of the outages at one point nine billion dollars — one point four per cent of GDP — inside an economy that contracted two per cent across the period, and the IMF had booked a further nine tenths of a point of GDP in crisis costs: lost revenue from the stalled activity, emergency spending on generatio…
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