Special Issue: The U.S. Now Runs Venezuela. Step One: Electricity.

Today’s special edition looks at the most important and least glamorous part of the U.S. intervention in Venezuela: the grid. With Maduro removed and Washington now effectively responsible for managing the country, a lot of commentary is focused on oil, sanctions, and geopolitics. But none of that matters if Venezuela can’t keep the lights on. This essay walks through what the U.S. has inherited, why the grid is the real bottleneck, and what it will take to rebuild reliable power in a state that quite literally ran out of electricity.

The night the lights went out in Caracas was total. Streetlamps blinked off, traffic signals died mid-cycle, and the city folded into darkness that felt ancient rather than modern. People lit candles and tried to make sense of a country that seemed to lose a little more of its future every time the grid collapsed. Nurses in ICU wards used their phones as flashlights. Water pumps became ornaments. Children whispered about when the power might return.

Three years later, in January 2026, a different kind of shock rippled through Caracas and Washington alike: U.S. special operations forces captured Nicolás Maduro in a precision raid, and President Donald Trump declared that the United States would temporarily run Venezuela while a political transition unfolded. It was seismic, unprecedented, and profoundly destabilizing — the imposition of external custodianship over a sovereign state’s executive branch. But beneath the geopolitical fireworks lies a far more prosaic problem that will determine whether this intervention succeeds or collapses into chaos: electricity.

Almost every conversation in Washington and oil-industry circles has been about barrels per day, sanctions relief, and contract terms for U.S. firms itching to return to Venezuela’s fields. These are important conversations. But they are also profoundly premature. You cannot restart oil production on a societal scale until you restart the electric grid that undergirds it, along with water systems, hospitals, telecoms, and everyday life. And Venezuela, in the literal sense, does not have a functioning power grid.

Before anyone rewrites the global energy map, they have to grasp what has happened to Venezuela’s electricity system.

For years, official figures pointed to roughly 36 gigawatts of installed generation capacity. That number lived in glossy government brochures and economic forecasts, but in practice it had become a grotesque fiction. By the late 2010s, experts estimated that only about 10–12 gigawatts of capacity were genuinely available for reliable service — barely enough to keep a single major metropolitan area comfortable, let alone an entire country of 30 million.

Why the gap? Two words: ideology and neglect.

Hydropower once formed the backbone of Venezuelan electricity, especially the enormous Guri Dam complex on the Caroní River in Bolívar state. Guri alone has a nameplate capacity of about 10,235 megawatts spread across more than 30 turbine-generator units of various sizes, including high-capacity Francis turbines exceeding 700 MW each. Downstream sit other hydro plants — the Caruachi Dam with about 2,160 MW from a dozen Kaplan turbines, and the Macagua complex, which totals 3,168 MW across a couple of dozen units. Together, these hydroelectric plants once accounted for the majority of national supply, in some years 65–80 percent of all generation.

On paper, that looks robust. In practice, it was precarious.

By the mid-2010s, droughts exposed just how brittle this reliance on water had become. Reservoir levels fell, and turbines at Guri were forced to throttle back to protect equipment. Ideally, this is where thermal generation — gas and oil-fueled plants — would pick up the slack. Venezuela has dozens of thermal units scattered around the country: large plants like Termozulia with about 1,590 MW of combined gas turbines near Maracaibo; Cardón Genevapca at roughly 315 MW; and clusters of smaller units in places like Barinas, El Furrial, and Guarenas. In the early 2010s, emergency programs purchased additional gas turbines and modular units, often under hastily negotiated contracts, to add supposedly 3,000–4,000 MW of capacity.

That is what installed capacity looked like. What worked looked very different. Many of these thermal plants were never properly integrated into the grid, lacked consistent gas or diesel supply, or sat unfinished. Combined-cycle units languished half-built, and imported wind turbines staged on the Paraguaná peninsula generated headlines but almost no megawatts. By 2019, the thermal fleet’s effective contribution had collapsed, leaving hydro to carry nearly all of what little power remained.

Even when generation machines do turn, much of the power never reaches a consumer. Transmission and distribution losses — the inevitable drag on any grid — have climbed into the mid-to-high 20-percent range, meaning a quarter or more of every megawatt produced simply evaporates in transit because of aging lines, overheated transformers, poor maintenance, and outdated protection systems.

Transmission infrastructure is a story in itself. Venezuela’s main grid — the Sistema Interconectado Nacional — was built around ultra-high-voltage 765-kilovolt corridors that carry bulk power from Guri toward the industrial heartland around Valencia and the capital, Caracas. This backbone is supplemented by 400 kV and 230 kV networks feeding regional load centers. The architecture was once cutting-edge, and for a time it worked. Today, many spans of line are running well past their design life, protective relays and control systems are antiquated or offline, and transformers at key substations fail with alarming frequency because there are no spares to swap in. In some cases, vegetation encroaches on rights-of-way, and lightning protection systems are, by modern standards, rudimentary. The result: the grid can, and does, trip entire regions offline when a fault occurs.

This brittle structure was brutally exposed in March 2019, when a fault on a major transmission line cascaded into a national blackout that left virtually all 23 states without power for days. Hospitals shut down, water systems stalled, telecommunications networks fell into static. At least twenty-one people died during the outage or its immediate aftermath, a grim testament to how intertwined electricity is with basic survival.

Compounding matters, until recently the Maduro government demonstrated a strategic willingness to cut internet access and cellular service during politically charged moments. While often blamed on vague “attacks,” some shut-offs coincided with protests or contentious political events. This tactic underscored a cruel calculus: control is not just about tanks and rhetoric, it is about darkness and silence. In a country already beset by infrastructural decay, weaponizing lack of communication and lack of power only deepened the sense that nothing, not even information, was secure.

Since 2019 the abnormal has become routine. Independent monitors have recorded hundreds of thousands of outages each year. In western states like Zulia and the Andes, extended rationing schedules of up to eight hours of cuts per day became normal. Caracas often fares better — not because the system works, but because government planners prioritize service to the capital for political reasons.

For ordinary Venezuelans, this is not a technical abstraction. It means taps run dry because water pumps lack electricity, hospitals run on generators that run out of fuel, and entire communities spend more time waiting for the lights than under them.

Now the United States finds itself — astonishingly — responsible for turning this around.

The early administration chatter in Washington is still dominated by oil, sanctions, and diplomatic strategy. Some lawmakers publicly suggest using future oil revenues to finance reconstruction. There is talk of inviting major Western energy firms back to revive wells and refineries. But if the grid is not stabilized, none of that will stick. Oil production facilities themselves depend on steady power — pumps, compressors, desalination units, control rooms: all require reliable electricity.

The task ahead is daunting but straightforward in its logic: you cannot rebuild the economy without rebuilding the grid. That starts with triage — guaranteeing electricity to hospitals, water systems, and ports using mobile generation and prioritized fuel logistics. It requires a hard, honest audit of equipment, line capacity, and operable turbines. The massive hydro plants must be rehabilitated and guarded against drought risk. Thermal plants — especially gas-fired units near major load centers — must be restored with real supply contracts and maintenance plans. Transmission corridors must be strengthened with modern relays and redundant pathways. Distribution networks — the lines that actually deliver power to homes — need transformer upgrades and surge protection.

And all of this must be paired with institution building. Corpoelec’s monopoly must be dismantled in practice if not in law. Engineers must be paid and empowered. Whistleblowers must be protected. Data must be recorded and published.

This work is not glamorous. It is not sexy. It is the boring heroism of maintenance — and it is what defines whether a society functions or collapses.

In Venezuela’s case, the grid was once a triumph of engineering. Under socialism it became a casualty of ideology. In the United States’ hands now lies the chance to make it something useful again — not as a prop for pipelines, but as a lifeline for millions.

Caracas may now have a different political reality. But until electrons flow reliably into homes, hospitals, water systems, and data networks — until the terrible idea of shutting off power or internet access for political convenience is impossible — Venezuela will remain a crisis in living color.

And here is the simplest metric of all: before anyone counts barrels or signs production contracts, ask this first:

Can you keep the lights on for one ordinary Tuesday?

If you can’t, nothing else matters.

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