Colombia's new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, is barely three weeks into a four-year term that promised order and prosperity, and already he is being pushed to declare a national emergency over something else entirely: the risk that the country's lights could go out.
A Senator's Warning on the Floor of Congress
During a Sept. 2 floor session, Sen. Juan Espinal pressed De la Espriella to invoke emergency powers that would fast-track environmental and prior-consultation approvals for power, transmission and gas projects stuck waiting to connect to the grid. His message was blunt: Colombia is running out of time before rationing becomes unavoidable, and the last administration is the reason why. "Colombia is probably going to go dark, and only Gustavo Petro is to blame," Espinal told colleagues.
The senator, who sits in the Centro Democrático bloc, tied the warning to four years without a single new hydrocarbon contract under Petro and to permitting bottlenecks that have stalled Caribbean coast energy projects. He also floated a Chile- and Peru-style energy-efficiency law, pointed to the Hidroituango hydro complex and the country's thermal fleet as the system's last real cushion, and cited Banco de la República figures putting the price of a single hour-long outage at roughly 200 billion pesos — the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars in losses.
Why This El Niño Has Forecasters on Edge
Behind the alarm is a climate forecast that has utility planners nervous. XM, the operator of Colombia's national grid, told regulators in a July security bulletin that models now show a 71% chance of a very strong El Niño forming across September, October and November, rising to 81% for the final quarter of the year — territory that could rival or exceed the intensity of the 2015-2016 episode. That forecast lands hard on a system where hydropower still supplies well over 60% of the country's electricity, meaning a dry, hot second half of the year translates almost directly into strain on the grid.
The math gets tighter from there. XM's own data show barely 15% of the new generation capacity planned for 2026 had actually come online by mid-July, while dozens of transmission projects are running behind schedule — a gap the operator itself has flagged as reducing the "firm energy" cushion the system needs for a prolonged drought. On the brighter side, reservoir levels climbed above 80% in late July — the threshold operators consider the minimum needed to weather an intense El Niño — though officials caution that figure can erode quickly once the dry months set in.
The Government's Line: Serious, Not Yet Critical
De la Espriella's administration has so far stopped short of declaring the emergency Espinal wants. XM's acting general manager, Juan Carlos Morales, has told local radio that Colombia remains far from a repeat of the country's infamous 1992 blackouts, even as he's acknowledged this year carries more uncertainty than usual and that thermal plants are already being leaned on harder while households are being asked to cut back. Natalia Gutiérrez, who heads the generators' association Acolgen, has struck a more pointed tone, warning that an outage is a real possibility this cycle and that a modern blackout would land very differently on an economy now wired into online banking, data centers and digital payments in ways it simply wasn't three decades ago.
Petro's Fossil-Fuel Freeze, in Reverse
The fight over emergency powers sits on top of a much bigger reversal already underway. Petro spent his presidency refusing to sign new oil and gas exploration deals and steering Colombia toward renewables — a stance that took him, four months before he left office, to an international summit in Santa Marta aimed at rallying support for a global move away from fossil fuels. De la Espriella, who took the oath of office Aug. 7 at a military venue in Cali rather than Bogotá's usual Capitolio, used his inaugural speech to stake out the opposite ground, insisting Colombia's clean-energy shift "must rise from strength, not weakness." His running mate, Vice President José Manuel Restrepo, had already signaled during the campaign that the government would move to reopen bidding for oil and gas contracts and authorize fracking in existing basins.
To manage the fallout, the new president tapped María Nohemí Arboleda, an electrical engineer, as energy minister — notably pulling her straight from nearly a decade running XM, the same grid operator now issuing the drought warnings driving this whole debate. Even before taking office, De la Espriella had gone on television to tell citizens his transition team had detected a "possible and imminent" energy crisis being handed off by the outgoing government.
Espinal's push shouldn't be read as opposition sniping. Centro Democrático backed De la Espriella in the runoff and has formally described itself as a governing-coalition party — though one that insists on voting its own line rather than following instructions from the Casa de Nariño, a friction that has already surfaced in fights over congressional leadership. That makes Espinal's demand less an attack from outside the tent and more a warning shot from inside a coalition that doesn't consider its support unconditional.
Why Colombians in South Florida Are Watching
None of this is an abstract policy fight for the Colombian diaspora. Nearly 240,000 people of Colombian origin call Broward and Miami-Dade home, per 2023 Census Bureau survey figures, with tens of thousands more settled in Palm Beach County — a footprint large enough to rank Colombians as South Florida's number-two Hispanic group, trailing only Cubans. Many still have parents, siblings or small businesses back home. For a community old enough to remember candlelit nights during Colombia's blackout-scarred early 1990s, the current back-and-forth over who's to blame lands as an uncomfortably familiar echo, even with the new government insisting the worst case is still avoidable.
Could De la Espriella Actually Declare an Emergency?
Colombian presidents have reached for this tool before, though the precedent is messier than it might first appear. Petro declared a broader economic, social and ecological emergency in February after a cold front triggered severe flooding across eight departments, including Córdoba — damage to homes, roads, bridges and schools, not specifically the power grid. A follow-up decree in March used that emergency to suspend electricity billing for affected households, rather than to fix broken infrastructure. Notably, when Colombia's Constitutional Court reviewed that February emergency in June, it upheld the declaration but explicitly carved out any measures touching the financial health of electric utilities or the broader risk to continuous power service — a signal that the same constitutional shortcut Espinal wants used for the drought could face real limits if it's aimed at the electricity sector specifically.
Congress had not voted on Espinal's request as of this writing, and De la Espriella's government has offered no timeline for a decision. What is clear is that keeping the lights on has become an early test of a presidency that campaigned on energy independence but inherited a grid with less margin for error than it has had in years.
