Mexico’s Power Crisis Stalls Economic Growth

Cancún, Quintana Roo — Power outages have become a specter haunting Mexico and threatening to halt the country's economic development. So far this year, at least 18 power cuts have been documented between May and September, the majority concentrated in the northeast and southeast, regions where grid saturation and extreme heat waves have exposed the vulnerability of the system.

The most recent blackout last Friday, September 26, hit the Yucatán Peninsula hard, semi-paralyzing key sectors. In Quintana Roo, hotels, restaurants, and businesses reported losses of between 10,000 and 50,000 pesos per establishment, in addition to extraordinary expenses from using emergency generators.

In Mérida and other municipalities in Yucatán, business chambers also reported million-dollar losses due to the interruption of productive activities. The industrial sector has not been exempt; according to national estimates, each hour without electricity can imply losses close to 200 million dollars in manufacturing. Although the magnitude in Yucatán is less than in the north of the country, experts warn that the lack of energy reliability in the peninsular region threatens the continuity of strategic projects, including nearshoring investments that saw the southeast as an emerging development hub.

"Nearshoring could be compromised if electrical reliability does not improve, discouraging foreign investment," experts stated.

The failures affect all sectors. The recent blackouts plunged homes, businesses, and hotels into darkness. In key tourist areas—Cancún, Tulum, Playa del Carmen—the interruption of supply paralyzed restaurants and turned off traffic lights, causing traffic chaos on the highways.

Business organizations insist that the electrical crisis cannot be minimized. Coparmex warns that blackouts directly impact the daily lives of families, who lose food due to lack of refrigeration, and the operation of industry, whose processes take hours to restart after an interruption, implying million-dollar losses and a reduction in the country's competitiveness.

In a statement, Coparmex Quintana Roo recognized the effort of local, state, federal authorities and the CFE to restore service, but underlined the urgency of implementing structural measures from the federal government. It stated that strengthening the electricity supply is not only a requirement for economic activity, but an indispensable condition for the social stability and sustainable development of the peninsula, and therefore urged the federal authority to act promptly and ensure that blackouts of this magnitude are not repeated.

The economic losses are already counted in the hundreds of millions. The National Index of the Maquiladora Industry (INDEX) estimates that a one-hour blackout causes losses of about 200 million dollars in the maquiladora sector. In this context, organizations like Coparmex demand more investment in energy. Its leader, José Medina Mora, affirms that the outages respond above all to "a lack of investment in the electrical sector," both public and private. The low budget for transmission and generation has led to slow progress on national grid projects; of 232 scheduled works, only 9 are completed, which calls into question Mexico's ability to sustain its industrial growth and attract capital. In fact, Coparmex warns that the country "is losing the opportunity opened by nearshoring" due to this lack of reliable energy.

Yucatán Peninsula in the Dark: Tourism and Energy in Check

The most recent case occurred on September 26, 2025, when an electrical failure left the Yucatán Peninsula completely in the dark.

The faulty line reached nine generating plants with 2,174 MW of capacity, affecting about two million users in Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. Within minutes, cities like Mérida, Cancún, and Chetumal were plunged into chaos: homes without light, hospitals and airports without power, and traffic lights out, causing congestion and minor accidents on southern routes.

Hotels and businesses in full operation had to resort to generators, while thousands of families watched as food spoiled in their refrigerators.

Federal authorities initially downplayed the crisis. President Claudia Sheinbaum attributed the outage to "a failure in a transmission line" during maintenance and emphasized that the generating plants were operating normally while service was restored. Likewise, the CFE urged people to report failures to 071 and assured it had "robust" prevention mechanisms. However, experts and local governments warn that these blackouts are not incidental.

It is important to highlight that the Federal Government itself, through the CFE, presented its 2025-2030 Expansion Plan as early as February 2025, which contemplates 51 projects with a projected installed capacity of more than 29,000 megawatts and an estimated investment of 22,377 million dollars. The program included wind, photovoltaic, combined cycle power plants, cogeneration with Pemex, and even battery storage systems, with entry into operation dates between 2025 and 2030.

Although on paper these figures represent an important boost, specialists warn that a large part of these works will be realized in the medium term, while the crisis of blackouts and grid saturation requires immediate solutions that guarantee stability for the productive sectors.

The governor of Yucatán, Joaquín Díaz Mena, acknowledged that the outages are the result of "decades of neglect and lack of planning" of the regional electrical infrastructure. The peninsula's geography, isolated from the rest of the country, and its dependence on old gas pipelines and transmission towers make it especially vulnerable. Furthermore, specialists emphasize that even the planned renewables in Yucatán are stalled by the weak grid. As an expert from IMCO pointed out, there are solar and wind parks in the peninsula, but they face "problems moving the energy" to the rest of the country due to the lack of investment in transmission lines.

In practice, this means that the growth in demand (driven by tourism and heat) exceeds the local generation and transmission capacity. This is why the CFE has had to ask companies to reduce their consumption during peak hours to avoid major outages, a sign of the precarious current energy reserve.

Following the last blackout, the official response was to announce massive investments to modernize the grid. In August 2025, the CFE presented a 163.5 billion peso plan for 2025-2030, with 275 new transmission lines and 524 substations. Of these, 30 projects will focus on the Yucatán Peninsula and industrial hubs in the southeast, regions identified as having high demand and frequent supply problems. According to the director of the CFE, Emilia Calleja, the expansion seeks to "guarantee a reliable, safe, and sufficient supply" where national production and tourism are concentrated.

"Unofficially, it is estimated that the number of blackouts occurring between May and the present date amounts to 18. The pattern of scheduled outages and regional failures documented in northeastern states like Nuevo León and Tamaulipas and southeastern states including Yucatán, Campeche, Veracruz, and Chiapas confirms the narrative of an electrical grid in critical condition. In Yucatán, for example, a massive scheduled blackout was carried out in July that left 19 municipalities without power due to the connection of a new substation, which demonstrates that these interruptions are not isolated events, but part of an emergency operation that reflects the structural fragility of the national electrical system."

It is for this reason that, until the energy infrastructure receives the necessary reinforcement, power outages will continue to undermine economic development and the confidence of national and foreign investors. If the lack of planning and the official narrative that minimizes the crisis persist, Mexico runs the risk of heading towards a scenario similar to that of countries like Cuba or Venezuela, where prolonged blackouts became part of daily life and the governments, despite proclaiming that the well-being of the people is their priority, ended up condemning the population to live in gloom, with an unstable electrical service that hinders any real possibility of progress.