Clash of the Government and the Junta with thousands of people affected by the power outages: marijuana plantations or lack of investment?

• Crime 'indoor' marijuana, the "green stain" that covers Granada and extends throughout almost all of Andalusia

Shrouded as if they were going to intervene in an anti-terrorist operation and, on some occasions, escorted by the Police,

technicians frequently inspect the urban environments of the most overloaded electrical substations, those that cause blackouts in the most vulnerable homes in full cold wave.

On Tuesday the 24th, an operation was carried out in the

neighborhood of Seville, where of the 34 supplies checked, 26 were illegally connected to the network.

The workers could not complete the round because the neighbors began to rebuke them and they had to leave because they were not in police custody.

On Friday the 27th, at the

(also in Seville), there they were escorted, 75 supplies were inspected, of which 54 were found to be fraudulent.

Behind many of these pirated hookups there are indoor marijuana plantations, a type of cultivation that began in Granada and has spread, according to the Andalusian Prosecutor's Office, like a green tide, to other Andalusian capitals.

Plantations need heat from lamps to grow in greenhouses.

And the producers use illegal connections to the electrical network that saturate the networks.

On dates of maximum electricity consumption, that is, just when a cold or heat wave occurs, overloads burst the subelectric stations and leave all the residents they serve without light: the illegal ones and the legal ones.

A drug store consumes what 80 homes

A single drug storey consumes the equivalent of a tower with eighty homes.

There is no installation that supports it.

And, if the network is reinforced with a new substation, fraudsters quickly detect the extra source of electricity and install new indoor plantations in its surroundings.

And so over and over again.

This devilish dynamic has thousands of residents of the most humble neighborhoods of

or

living from blackout to blackout when electricity is most needed.

This is how Endesa, the distribution company, explains it, and this is also stated by the

in its 2022 report, where it warns of the alarming increase in indoor marijuana cultivation in Andalusia, with a significant increase in crime in

, which has led to power cuts in entire neighborhoods.

The PSOE, For Andalucía or Más País demanded this week in Parliament from the Minister of Industry,

, more pressure on the supply companies to remedy the blackouts.

And the counselor replied that the problem has nothing to do with the lack of pressure but with fraud and the cultivation of drugs.

But, despite the official reports that link both phenomena, the Government sub-delegate in Seville,

, came out this Thursday with outrageous boxes to deny the cause-effect relationship that the Board had established in its parliamentary response: «I regret not sharing the statement that he makes that the problems of electricity supply in the province of Seville are fundamentally due to electricity fraud.

It is enough to point out that there is not a single police or Provincial Prosecutor's Office data that corroborates it, "Toscano wrote to the counselor, according to the note sent to the media.

Toscano accuses the Board of leaving its functions for not having carried out any inspection of the network and speculates on discriminatory treatment of poor neighborhoods: "There have been zero inspections and zero surveillance actions of the electrical network by the responsible administration" .

"If we were talking about other neighborhoods in the city, this reality would not be the same and surely inspections would be being carried out."

The sub-delegate therefore blames the Andalusian Government.

And, in reality, there is a responsibility of the Board, which is direct and complex, because many of the houses that are used as marijuana farms are public protection apartments owned by the autonomous administration.

But that does not mean that there is no link between drugs, organized crime and blackouts.

The Prosecutor's Office believes so and calls for a legislative change to toughen the penalties, since the fines established by the current norm are designed for domestic fraud, not to deter drug trafficking networks from illegal hookups that heat thousands of plantations in a way industry and move large amounts of money.

On the other hand, families that really cannot pay for the supply have access to social bonds that significantly lower the cost of electricity, recall Endesa.

It is curious that in the nuclei where more illegal couplings are detected, there are hardly any requests for discounted rates, which forces one to think that the motivation of fraudsters is not only social.

An "oversized" network

If the overload that interrupts the supply had to do exclusively with the lack of maintenance or investment in the network, it would have an easy solution, say Endesa sources.

This was the case with a series of blackouts that occurred in Triana (Seville) two years ago.

The company detected the origin of the problem and solved it by investing in strengthening and updating the network.

But what is beginning to spread through the peripheral neighborhoods of Seville is much more complex and, what is more worrying, affects more and more population centers.

Only in the capital Seville, fraud linked to drug trafficking has been registered in Torreblanca, His Eminence, La Plata, Palmete and the Polígono Sur. And it is also beginning to be detected in San Jerónimo.

Endesa has executed an investment plan for the Andalusian capital of 43.5 million euros over three years (2020-2022).

Currently, the city has some 3,000 transformation centers, 29 substations and 1,700 kilometers of medium lines and more than 11,500 kilometers of low voltage lines.

In fact, the company assures, the network is currently "oversized", with more installed power than the city needs.

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