Electric Catemaco

This is not a lie!

I was awakened this morning around 3:30 by a humongous thunder storm.

So I flipped on my computer muttering to myself how great beautiful downtown Catemaco's electrical service is, and that I should mention something positive about it despite the apparent haphazard connections crossing every street and in front of most homes. After all, in my five years in this town, through storms and hurricanes, I never had a major outage.

Famous last thoughts!
By the time I had raided the local ice machines to guard my food treasures imported from far away Veracruz city, electrical power returned at 3 pm, and I took back every nice thought I ever had about the electric company.

It also did not help to read my 2653 peso electric bill for 864 KW of TWO months service, with an unused AC. That is 2.9 pesos per KW, app 26 cents per KW.

Average US cost per KW is 9.5 cents per KW, including a few energy pigs like California and New York. Average US consumption is above 800 KW PER MONTH. Obviously I am only half ass average.

Isn´t it wonderful how cheap Mexico is to live in?

Actually electricity is cheap, if you live like the majority of low electricity consuming Mexicans (think cold water showers, hand washed laundry, 40 W light bulbs and outrageous propane gas bills).

Those Mexican consumers who depend on heavily subsidized utility bills, whose charges are staggered in categories and by consumption, regularly cause small civil wars when users get moved from a highly subsidized category to a lower one. And that includes a bunch of gringos who brag about their utility bills in their first blog posts.