After years of construction, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has finally brought a massive new 499-megawatt natural gas plant online in Mérida, Yucatán. The facility, named the Central de Ciclo Combinado “Elvia Carrillo Puerto,” began operating in early May to serve over 1.53 million residents across the Yucatán Peninsula.
The story is similar across the country, and especially dire in states like Veracruz and Tamaulipas, where outages have become nearly daily occurrences.
Yet, just days after its activation, a stark reality has set in: the plant is too little, too late. The Peninsula remains trapped in a vicious cycle of blackouts, exposing the deep-seated failures of Mexico’s embattled national power grid.
The fragility of the system was laid bare on September 26, 2025, when a transmission line failure triggered a cascade collapse, taking nine power plants offline and plunging over 2.3 million users in Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo into darkness. Traffic lights died in Cancún, telephone networks went silent, and hospitals were forced to scramble on backup generators.
The crisis is not for lack of spending. The CFE invested 2.5 billion pesos in new combined-cycle plants designed to generate surplus energy. Yet, in a damning indictment of state planning, those plants are complete but cannot operate.
An investigation by the news outlet Código Magenta revealed the facilities are unusable because the necessary gas pipelines were never built. “Without gas, there is no electricity,” the report noted. In response, the CFE turned to a patchwork of emergency diesel turbines and portable generators, many contracted through inexperienced companies, while the state-owned subsidiary CFEnergía operates “outside the scrutiny of Congress”.
Public Humiliations in the Dark
The grid’s unreliability has reached the point of high-profile embarrassment for the nation’s leadership. At the prestigious Tianguis Turístico in Acapulco, an event designed to showcase Mexico to the global travel industry, a blackout interrupted the inauguration ceremony. Federal officials were forced to continue their speeches by cellphone light for over twenty minutes, joking that the incident would be something to tell their grandchildren about.
Perhaps the most striking example of the disconnect between rhetoric and reality occurred just days ago in Baja California. Governor Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda was holding a morning press conference to assure the public that there were “no power outages” in the state. As her staff defended the administration’s investments in electrical infrastructure, the cameras and lights abruptly shut off. A video quickly went viral showing the governor speaking in the darkness, the very embodiment of a system that denies its own crumbling reality.
Energy Infrastructure and Corruption
Yucatán Governor Joaquín Díaz Mena said the blackouts result from “decades of neglect and a lack of planning,” leaving the infrastructure without the capacity to meet skyrocketing demand. Energy experts have reached a consensus that there is a “major infrastructure shortage in electricity transmission, natural gas pipelines, and storage” across the country, warning that this lack of solid infrastructure inhibits large-scale investment.
Meanwhile, the sector remains plagued by corruption and mismanagement. Reports have emerged that the CFE is relying on illegally introduced diesel to run plants, while state-owned subsidiaries are allegedly bypassing federal anti-corruption oversight to award millions in contracts.
The Paradox of the Energy Engineer President
At the helm of this crisis is President Claudia Sheinbaum, who holds a master’s degree and a PhD in energy engineering and presents herself as a scientifically minded environmentalist. She has pledged to raise renewable energy’s share of the national grid to 38% by 2030.
Yet, despite her credentials, Sheinbaum continues to champion a fossil-fuel-first agenda. She has argued for “energy sovereignty” by exploiting natural gas deposits—a move that would effectively endorse fracking, a practice she avoids naming directly. Her administration remains heavily reliant on state oil giant Pemex, and despite the viability of battery storage and hybrid grid management systems, she has repeatedly claimed that solar power is not a viable national solution for the simple reason that “the sun does not shine at night.”