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When Raquel Rubio’s 13-month baby developed a 102F fever last week, she rushed to the doctor. Her son, Liam, had been in Rubio’s apartment without air conditioning for several hours; Nuevo León, the Mexican state where she lives, had reached 109F that day.
The doctor confirmed Rubio’s suspicions that the heat was driving her son’s temperature, and instructed her to bathe Liam and keep him hydrated. But Rubio couldn’t go back home; she had been dealing with power shortages for the past two weeks and didn’t want to take her son back into the blistering heat.
As a deadly, record-breaking heat dome settled on Mexico and Texas in the last two weeks, some states in Mexico have seen temperatures exceed 113F.
Late on Wednesday, Mexican health authorities reported at least 112 heat-related deaths so far this year – almost triple the total figures for 2022. The data also shows a significant spike in heat-related fatalities in the last two weeks.
The deaths reached a peak in the week of 18-24 June, with 69 deaths in one week nationwide, an unprecedented number. The week of 11-17 June was also unusually bad, with 31 deaths across the country.
The record-high temperatures have put enormous pressure on the country’s power grid.
Experts say a lack of investment has left the Mexican electric system unprepared for the challenge. As climate change fosters extreme heat in the country, power shortages could become increasingly common.
Last Tuesday, the National Energy Control Center declared emergency operational status when Mexico’s electricity reserve reached a historic low. In Mexico, summer is the season with the highest energy demand since people are more likely to use machines like fans or air conditioning, said Rosanety Ibarra, an independent energy expert. But this year, even in temperate cities, like Mexico City, stores ran out of fans, local media reported.
Mexico is one of the countries where the effects of climate change can be seen more obviously, said Andrew Pershing, VP for science at Climate Central, which developed the Climate Shift Index, a tool that estimates climate change’s influence on local weather.
In places closer to the equator, like Mexico, the temperature doesn’t usually vary that much, so it’s easier to identify weather conditions that are “highly unlikely without climate change”, he says. Last week’s temperatures in north-east Mexico and central Texas scored five in the Climate Shift Index, which means researchers calculate they were five or more times likelier because of climate change.
The unprecedented temperatures put the Mexican electric system up against the wall, and more than 10 Mexican states reported power shortages last week.
For several years, Mexico has neglected investment in its electric system, which gets most of its power from state-owned energy plants, said Ibarra.
“While the energy demand has steadily increased, energy generation hasn’t increased in the past five years,” said Carlos Flores, an energy expert and head of new markets in America for Lightsource BP.
In 2014, the Mexican congress approved new energy reforms, and private companies supplying clean energy were supposed to replace the state-owned fossil fuel plants, but the current government reversed course. “This government’s bet was that they could cover the country’s energy demand with the state-owned energy plants, and here are the consequences,” Ibarra says.
The problem is not only generating enough energy but the fact that the whole system is old and underfunded, Ibarra said, adding that the government hasn’t invested in electricity transmission lines in at least a decade. In the past three years, the amount that the Federal Electricity Commission has invested in “physical infrastructure” has been the lowest in at least 10 years, said Jesús Carrillo, the sustainable economy director at the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a Mexican thinktank.
“When you have a problem the size we have when the demand is increasing, and high temperatures are also causing demand to increase, you are facing more risks,” he says.
While it is hard to know for sure what is causing the power shortages, it is common practice for the National Center for Energy Control to disconnect neighborhoods from the electric network to prevent the system from failing, said Flores.
Citizens dealing with power outages are scrambling to adjust to the disruption and danger. Luis Alejandro Calderón, an American citizen who lives in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and his wife had to sleep on their balcony last Sunday because they didn’t have electricity, and the heat inside was unbearable. The power shortage lasted more than 40 hours, so they stayed in a hotel in another area the next night, and a lot of their food went bad.
“We have never had to deal with anything like this,” he said. “When there is a power cut, electricity is usually back in 15 minutes.”
Mexico typically surpasses the peak energy demand from the previous year in July, but this year it has already happened, leaving many worried that the coming weeks could hold even worse blackouts. “This is a product of the climate emergency, and that is not the government’s responsibility, but it is their responsibility to build an electric system that is prepared for this,” Ibarra said.
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