Comisión Federal de Electricidad

Enrique Ochoa Reza settlement agreement scandal

In September 2016, it was reported by Pablo Gomez from Aristegui Noticias, that Enrique Ochoa Reza, who had stepped down two months earlier as head of the commission after being selected leader of his party, had received $1,206,000.00 pesos as a settlement agreement, despite voluntarily resigning his position. Furthermore, Ochoa Reza stayed on the commission's top job for only two years and 155 days, while the "Manual de Trabajo de Servidores Publicos de Mando la CFE" (the regulation concerning high-ranking positions in the CFE) clearly stipulates that settlements can only apply after a minimum three years on the job, and only to those individuals whose retirement is not voluntary. The payment probably constituted a violation of the Mexican Constitution's Article 127 as well, which prohibits settlements of this nature in favour of state-owned corporations' employees (with few exceptions). Despite the media and popular backlash, Ochoa maintained the settlement agreement was legal. Two months later, in response to the 2016 San Pablito Market fireworks explosion that occurred in Tultepec on December 20, 2016, Ochoa announced he had given the 1.2 million pesos to the UNAM Foundation and the Michou and Mau Foundation, which specializes in the rehabilitation of children with severe burns.

2020 blackout

Millions of people in Mexico City, State of Mexico, Nuevo León, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Sinaloa, Yucatán, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and other states were left without electricity for several hours during a blackout that began at 2:29 p.m. CST on December 28, 2020; restoration of service began twenty-three minutes later and was completely restored by 4:12 p.m. The Centro Nacional de Control de Energía ("National Center for Energy Control, CENACE) said the blackout was due to an “imbalance in the National Interconnected System between the load and the power generation causing a loss of approximately 7,500 MW” and that automatic protection schemes were activated in order to avoid a greater risk due to the incident in the system. Manuel Bartlett, director of CFE, and Carlos Meléndez, general director of CENACE, said that there was no damage to the national electricity system, nor there was any economic loss due to the blackout.

CFE reported on December 30 that the blackout was caused by a fire in 30 hectares (74 acres) of grasslands in the municipality of Padilla, Tamaulipas. However, the Tamaulipas State Civil Protection Coordination rejected the document presented by the CFE, saying the document was falsified, and the state announced on January 3, 2021, that it planned to sue the CFE. Meanwhile, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador reiterated his support for Manuel Bartlett and promised that a similar blackout would not occur again.

After the state of Tamaulipas threatened to sue, Bartlett admitted the accusation of grassfires had been falsified and suggested the blackout was caused by renewable energy sources.

February 2021 winter storm

The February 13–17, 2021 North American winter storm caused blackouts in Texas and northern Mexico and cost at least three dozen lives in Mexico and the United States. 5.9 million users were directly affected users in Nuevo León, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Chihuahua along the Texas border and users in Aguascalientes, Colima, State of México, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, Nayarit, Puebla, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas were indirectly affected by rolling blackouts. Rocío Nahle García, Secretary of Energy, asked the populace to save energy, and AMLO announced that Mexico would increase the use of oil and coal to produce electricity as well as purchase three shiploads of natural gas to deal with power shortages. He also warned that periodic local outages would continue through February 21. 100% of power was restored by the afternoon of February 17.