The Dominican electricity crisis is essentially that of Europe and the United States

Summary: This Grupo Millennium Hispaniola (GMH) article responds to the criticism that says "Don’t tell us ... that in the United States and Europe there is also the same problems with electricity that we have here [in Dominican Republic], because nobody is going to believe it ... " What follows is an edited translation of the article La crisis eléctrica dominicana es esencialmente la de Europa y EUA, posted on July 13, 2012, on acento.com.do.

These three crises come from architecture frameworks which hold an excessive state intervention that interferes with the best relationships between the producer, the retailer, and the consumer. These relationships need to consider that the assumption of the guarantee of cheap energy is replaced by the guarantee of increasingly cheap information.

The architecture framework of the vertically integrated power industry, under the protection of cheap energy, evolved successfully until the early 70's, becoming essentially the same throughout the world. Practices shows considerable differences in the electricity sectors in the world before and after those years. For example, before as in Europe and the USA the industry prospered; after as in the Dominican Republic that infant industry began to fail miserably before the others, becoming a political problem.

After the disappearance of the basic assumptions that held the vertically integrated industry in Europe and the USA, the crisis in those industries have contagion their respective economies. Similarly, the architecture framework which replaced it in some jurisdictions remained under the same assumption of cheap energy, instead of that of cheap information. To see the contagion effect, for example, according to a report by the United States Department of Energy at the end of 2008, for every dollar charged to end customers in that country poor quality add an average of one half of a dollar.

Note the criticism made to the article Systemic leverage to economies via their electric link, that says "Don’t tell us ... that in the United States and Europe there is also the same problems with electricity that we have here [in Dominican Republic], because nobody is going to believe it ... " The problems are definitely the same, as in the financial sector crisis, it is systemic risk (adverse leverage) caused by the architecture framework, in which as always the local manifestations are totally different.

Peter Senge, C. Sharmer Otto, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, during the investigation that resulted in the book “Presence: human purpose and the field of the future” discovered the axiom "what is most systemic is most local,” which definitely applies to any sector. Hence, that axiom confirms both that the systemic crisis is essentially the same, as well as the large differences that manifest themselves in the different economies they contagion.

The reality is that we in the Dominican Republic have been witnessing the global emergent whole of the electricity power industry long before others, but the result here has been the socio-electric anti-system. From the 1990s, in Dominican Republic we have had the opportunity to increasingly witness ever more of the whole that has been trying to emerge but that has been stopped by political decisions at the expense of professional ones, for example, by means of huge subsidies.

In explaining the axiom, Senge and his colleagues say that "... Unlike machines, living systems, such as your body or a tree, create themselves. They are not mere assemblages of their parts but are continually growing and changing along with their elements." They added that “[t] he deepest systems we enact are woven into the fabric of everyday life, down to the most minute detail ... This is so important for us to understand. We, every one of us, may be able to change the world, but only as we experience more and more of the whole in the present."

To make matters worse, the current basic assumptions are based on smart grids as technologies, inanimate things, when interconnected electric power sectors are active things that have much more life with the information technology that will enable people to actively participate.