Chile Forum

fraggle092 wrote:Does anyone here know how much, say a 15Kg balon of gas costs in P. Arenas?
The media seem not to mention this, as usual they are long on sentiment but short on facts.
I paid around $13.500 in the Norte Chico in December.

Should have answered this earlier. Although pricing is tiered and there are variable subsidies, for the most part the same amount of residential natural gas in Punta Arenas costs about 1/10th what it does in Santiago. The average heating bill for a household with a leaky house and an unregulated ama de casa is about US$50.

The problem is, natural gas has been subsidised to a great extent for so long, that the residents don't even know that it's subsidised. If the providers were clever (observe use of subjunctive to indicate what is not real) they would have made indications on monthly gas bills to remind users of the amount of subsidy.

Add to that the fact that the biggest money-losing agency of the Chilean government service providers is the national energy agency that supplies and subsidises that gas. Something like the equivalent of 4 billion US dollars in the red. A number so big you can't even express it in CLP.

Not surprisingly, this rate increase is actually the work of the Bachelet government, which ran the national energy agency into the ground and into massive debt while providing special benefits for segments of the population perceived to be her party vote base. The Bachelet rate increase was another of those many time-bombs, scheduled to explode after she left office, to bring grief to the incoming government and nostalgia for the good old socialist times. The more that is being brought to the surface about the Bachelet government, the more people (some people) are beginning to realise how much of a corrupt socialist scam it really was. But attempts now to bring fiscal responsibility and particularly sane energy practices to the country are going to meet stiff resistance.

Patagonias wrote:

In fact the heating gas down here is comparatively cheap and highly subsidised. People have gotten used to nearly free gas as an inducement to live down here. And of course wherever there is a heating subsidy people will abuse it. So naturally they build their houses with little sense of thermal insulation or efficiency, wasting what gas they burn. Many people here keep their homes at 30 deg C or so.

This is a point I tried to compose in a Posting of Chile Real Estate, Property, and Construction, Re: Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF's). There needs to be better planning and understanding of building materials and marketing efforts to the public for proper and modern techniques in construction. However, from comments and readings on this Forum, the Chilean residents may have habitual practices of just overlooking practical new methods and settle for the cheap choice. It’s why it is said:”Ya get what you pay for”

Patagonias wrote:

Not surprisingly, this rate increase is actually the work of the Bachelet government, which ran the national energy agency into the ground and into massive debt while providing special benefits for segments of the population perceived to be her party vote base. The Bachelet rate increase was another of those many time-bombs, scheduled to explode after she left office, to bring grief to the incoming government and nostalgia for the good old socialist times. The more that is being brought to the surface about the Bachelet government, the more people (some people) are beginning to realise how much of a corrupt socialist scam it really was. But attempts now to bring fiscal responsibility and particularly sane energy practices to the country are going to meet stiff resistance.

Appears Bachelet and U.S. Pres Obahma are two cats from the same litter?

GOTI wrote: Re: Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF's). There needs to be better planning and understanding of building materials and marketing efforts to the public for proper and modern techniques in construction. However, from comments and readings on this Forum, the Chilean residents may have habitual practices of just overlooking practical new methods and settle for the cheap choice.

There was an article on the front page of today's main regional paper, La Prensa Austral, entitled “Aislar mi casa no sirvió de nada” (Insulating my house did no good). Even the press are in on this.... they don't want energy efficiency, they just want more cheap gas forever, in a country that is energy-poor to start with. Progress is up against this sort of recalcitrance, which is effectively supported by the social order and the local media. The prevailing notion here and in much of Chile is "Es lo que hay" -- it's what there is -- and many efforts to bring about improvements in building, including energy-efficient investment in building, are met with crossed arms and impeccably closed minds.

It's interesting to note that in some of the older houses here built to British standards (that's why our dimensional wood is measured in inches in Chile) there was originally a reasonable attempt at insulation, using materials such as sawdust or wool waste. Now those materials have disappeared from the old houses. I was actually told by a local college-graduate chilean that if you don't change the sawdust or wood shavings every year or so, there is no insulation value left. That is the mindset and the quality of Chilean education that we are up against in bringing this country out of the 18th century.

Some of my critics insist that if chilenos had good materials websites and knew how to google then the lights would come on, and Mazda would triumph over Ahriman. I insist that the proliferation of more data has very little to do with overcoming the fundamental and debilitating inertia of social outlook. Chilean DNA is lacking in the payoff-over-time chromosome. Might be run over tomorrow so why insulate for a 5-year payback horizon?

The most fundamental aspects of heat transfer seem to escape even educated Chileans. I sold an older house to a college-educated chileno in this village, to be remodeled. The climate here is comparable to Prince Rupert in British Columbia, which has similar latitude and conditions except for higher wind here. I think about 1 percent or less of the remodel budget went to insulation, and even that was wasted. Here is his concept of ceiling insulation: directly above the cielo raso, zilch, nada, rien, res, nichts, just the thickness of paint on the 18mm HR100 that makes up the very combustible ceiling (so yes it's a firetrap AND energy -inefficient - the apex of modern chilean home remodeling). The attic, the entretecho, is essentially a wind-tunnel, with one air-exchange every 60 seconds. There is two inches of kraft-backed fiberglass batting up against the metal roof. It does absolutely no good, because the prevailing strong winds enter the 5 cm daylight gap at the junction of roof and walls, allowing every kilocalorie that enters the attic to be blown out immediately. I pointed this out to him and explained some possible improvements. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, I don't care if you're an engineer or not; you're not from around here and you don't understand how we do things.

And that is at the core of the civil disturbances down here right now: the perceived right to continue to have 80 percent of the cost of residential heating gas subsidised, and the associated right to not have to insulate or otherwise weatherise buildings. And the local population is evidently moving in the direction of a quixotic regional shutdown of most economic activity to preserve those imagined fueros.

Taking some lines from the mob-chant playbook, "El pueblo, unido, jamás será [con]vencido."

patagoniax wrote:English-language Mercopress pick up the story on the 16.8 percent gas hike in XIIa región and tells the world it's a 20 percent increase. (By the time Havana reports perhaps it will be a 50 percent increase?)

http://en.mercopress.com/2011/01/06/pun ... price-hike

These events allow us to take a look at the misbehaviour of the Spanish language press.

I notice that activities like Yahoo news pick up stories from agencies such as EFE, which bills itself as "the leading Spanish language news agency and the fourth largest news agency.... and bla bla bla.

The EFE story covering the events in Punta Arenas provides this little bit of [dis]information:

En Punta Arenas, sus habitantes consumen grandes cantidades de gas para contrarrestar las bajas temperaturas, que incluso en verano no superan los 15 grados Celsius.


Of course, looking at the forecast for tomorrow in Punta Arenas we see that it's supposed to reach 18 deg C, and that's not exactly an exceptional summer day. It often gets to 25 C or better, somewhat greater than the 15 that EFE claims. But hey, the Spanish-language wire services are not expected to maintain any sort of journalistic ethics when there's news to be created, I mean, reported.

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==EDIT -- There are now 3 threads that are covering this topic so I will unplug from this one and update on the related travel advisory thread

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