Re: Fowarded post on cheap eletricity...

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In support to Nestor, I would say that:

(a) In Brazil today, the supply of natural gas has been privatized and
handed, e.g., in the Rio de Janeiro area, to an extremely rapacious
monopoly whose main stockholder is the Spanish consortium Iberdola, who
is managing the gas supply in Rio de Janeiro in the same way as
Telefónica is managing the telephone service in São Paulo - that is,
making the service very expensive (all repair workers were laid off,
organized again as "cooperatives" without any social rights, and forced
to perform the same services for Telefónica at cheaper prices; the
cooperative "owners" react by blackmailing the telephone users to pay
them an aside in order to have their telephones properly repaired) and
completely unreliable.

(b)Such rapacious monopolies as Iberdola cannot organize properly the
supply of what is, after all, a social - and ecological -necessity (the
fact that Brazil isn't entirely deforestated is due to the fact that,
thanks to state-owned Petrobras, petrol gas supply was already
widespread in the 50s and wood pratically ceased to be used as fuel, as
in other 3rd World countries).The fact is that, even if the supply of
natural gas is now plentiful, thanks to the new oil fields on the coast
of Rio de Janeiro, Iberdola cannot supply it at reasonable costs to
prospective users, be they house-dwellers or industrial consumers.

(c) It has been proposed by remaining bourgeois nationalist diehards-
yes, there are still a few and becoming more vocal because of the
obvious economic and social disaster that was the privatization of
social utilities - that the remaining elletric energy producing firms
still in the hands of the state - such as Furnas, whose privatization is
being resisted by the governor of Minas Gerais, former president Itamar
Franco, who is concerned with the arising problems of managemant of that
state's water supply when the huge dams owned by Furnas are privatized -
be kept state-owned and associate with Petrobras to form a huge energy
consortion that will busy itself with the market supply for all forms of
energy - eletric, gas, eolic, solar, and so on. The main problem here
being, naturally, that the management of such remaining *estatais*
(state-owned firms) can hardly be called democratic and is prone to all
kinds of shady deals made by these firms directors, as well as episodes
of mismanagement such as the recent gigantic oil-spill in Rio de
Janeiro, that didn't do more damage only because the Rio de Janeiro bay
is already an almost dead ecosystem.

The issue, therefore, has to be handled not as a technical problem, but
as a problem of organizing a huge social experiment in a truly grand
scale, by linking the economic efficiency issue to the idea of
democratic participation in the management of the state, something that,
once voiced, cannot fail to have truly revolutionary effects, as this
demand for democratic management of state-owned firms - something no
bourgeois state could perform completely - would become a truly
*transitional* demand...

Carlos Rebello

> Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 15:35:53 -0300
> From: "Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Forwarded post on cheap electricity from a power plant operator
>
> En relación a Forwarded post on cheap electricity from a power ,
> el 7 Feb 00, a las 9:32, por David Walters.
>
> In an extremely instructive posting, which I cannot but thank him
> (and Lou Pr) for, David Walters has made a compelling case for the CT
> technology.

> I had heard of the CT plants as far back as in 1989, when we were
> trying to develop a common programme for the elections with the
> Peronists and the Developmentists.  "We" meaning the Izquierda
> Nacional and other groups from the Left, while the other groups
> represented, so to say, the mainstream bourgeois or petty bourgeois
> line of thought.
>
> Among the Developmentist crew there appeared a very interesting and
> informed engineer, Herrera by family name, can't remember his
> personal name now, who made an equally compelling case for the CTs.
> I admit that he faced a stubborn and quite hard-nosed opposition from
> the "Leftists", me included. But the opposition did not arise from
> technical questions, rather from political questions.
>
> Our objection to the proposition was
>
> (a) that it put the future of Argentine power generation in the hands
> of the providers of gas (by those times, already handed over, though
> not completely) to foreign, imperialist, companies,
>
> (b) that although Argentina is known as possessing relatively
> extensive gasfields (particularly in the South, in the island of
> Tierra del Fuego), transportation of gas to the plants was not an
> easy thing to implement,
>
> (c) that -as I argued on my "manifesto"-  hydro projects have a more
> important consequence than cheap electricity, and that _prices were
> not the main element to be taken into account when drafting a program
> on energy issues_; the argument, more or less, ran like this:
>
> * properly programmed and designed dams (that took care of ecological
> damage, relocation of people, and so on) could serve as a booster for
> national manufacturing, an integrator so to say, since Argentina had
> its own technology on the field, some of which acquired from the fSU
> during the mid-70s (particularly the Kaplan generators working at the
> Salto Grande dam across the Uruguay river);
>
> * transmission lines wouldn't need to be excessively long (what one
> would presumptuously call the "Argentinian civilization" is located
> at no more than 600/700 miles of the proposed dam sites), and we also
> had our own experience in their construction;
>
> * side benefits like flood control were not something that a CTs
> program could guarantee.
>
> As you see, it was a social and political oppossition, not a
> technical one.