By Juan Daniel Correa Salazar
In collaboration with BNamericas
In Chinese, the word for crisis is written 危机 (wēijī). Two characters.
Danger and opportunity.
That is precisely where Colombia now stands as it enters a new electoral cycle.
The country holds one of Latin America’s greatest energy opportunities. But it also faces one of its most delicate risks: believing the energy transition can be sustained through narrative alone.
Energy does not work that way.
Energy requires execution. Infrastructure. Transmission. Storage. Backup capacity. Regulation. The ability to coordinate complex systems under climatic, political and economic pressure. It requires technical rigor, vision and seriousness.
When energy systems fail, they do not fail in abstraction. They fail in hospitals, water systems, industries, small businesses and entire cities. They fail in everyday life. And in a country like Colombia — marked by territorial inequality and climate vulnerability — trust fails with them.
That is why the coming energy debate cannot be reduced to slogans or ideological trenches. The energy transition is not a cultural war. It is a test of institutional capacity.
And Colombia enters that test under strain.
The market already understands the problem
BNamericas’ 2026 Electric Power Capex Report reveals something Colombia should read carefully: Latin America has already entered a new phase of the energy transition.
The region’s leading power companies are projecting more than US$129 billion in investments for 2026, up from just over US$101 billion executed the previous year.
But the important story is not merely the scale of investment. It is where that capital is moving.
Investment is increasingly concentrating on the system’s real bottlenecks: transmission, storage, firm capacity, operational resilience and grid modernization. In other words, the infrastructure that ultimately determines whether an energy transition becomes viable — or unstable.
That is the deeper signal.
The region has understood that the energy transition will not be defined by speeches, but by infrastructure. Not by announcements, but by execution capacity. Latin America can fill headlines with solar and wind projects, but if it cannot transmit that energy, store it, stabilize it and sustain it under climate pressure, the entire system begins to tighten.
And that is exactly where Colombia stands today.
While the country remains trapped in ideological disputes and short political cycles, the power system is already sending more concrete signals: transmission bottlenecks, structural delays, urgent storage needs and mounting pressure on reliability.
The energy transition is no longer an aspirational conversation. It is now a discussion about governance, infrastructure and the capacity to sustain a modern country without operating permanently at the edge of the system.
That is where improvisation ends.
The threat is no longer theoretical
Time is beginning to narrow.
XM, Colombia’s grid operator, warned that a potential El Niño event between 2026 and 2027 could push the country’s power system into operating conditions not previously experienced, placing national electricity demand at risk.
The operator’s recommendations are revealing: accelerate delayed projects, strengthen storage capacity, secure backup fuels and prepare regulatory measures now.
That alone should change the tone of the public conversation.
While part of the political debate remains trapped between propaganda and polarization, Colombia’s energy system is sending far more serious warnings: delayed transmission projects, stalled infrastructure, insufficient storage and growing stress on system reliability.
Colombia’s power matrix remains one of the cleanest in the region thanks to its hydroelectric base. But that strength also exposes a structural vulnerability: when water levels fall, the system trembles.
When it rains, the country breathes.
When it does not, anxiety returns.
That is not resilience. It is managed fragility.
It would be irresponsible to assume that favorable rainfall has solved the underlying structural problem.
The core issues remain intact: delayed transmission, regulatory uncertainty, marginal storage capacity, slow execution timelines and a power matrix still excessively dependent on climate conditions.
The transition also runs through communities
There is another equally dangerous mistake: believing territories and communities are obstacles to the energy transition.
They are not.
A significant portion of Colombia’s strategic delays stems directly from the inability to build territorial trust around energy projects.
The energy transition cannot be built against communities. It has to be built with them.
That requires abandoning two deeply damaging caricatures.
The first is treating prior consultation processes as inconvenient obstacles that merely delay investment.
The second is degrading those mechanisms into instruments for rent-seeking, political leverage or opportunistic negotiation around strategic infrastructure.
Prior consultation is a legitimate and necessary instrument in a pluriethnic and megadiverse country like Colombia. When conducted properly, it protects rights, structures difficult conversations and can strengthen the relationship between projects and territories. The problem emerges when legitimacy erodes — when political actors, intermediaries or even some sectors begin using these processes to indefinitely block projects, extract particular benefits or turn the energy transition into another arena of fragmentation and distrust.
When communities feel excluded from projects, conflict emerges. And when territories perceive that the transition primarily benefits external capital while leaving local impacts behind, trust collapses.
Clean energy cannot reproduce traditional extractive logic under a new corporate language.
Well-designed projects should become genuine platforms for territorial development: employment, infrastructure, connectivity, energy access, technology transfer and community strengthening.
One of Colombia’s greatest challenges moving forward is understanding that sustainability means far more than reducing emissions. It means building systems capable of sustaining themselves environmentally, socially, economically and technologically over time. It means building lasting relationships between energy, territory, institutions and society.
And that requires something much more difficult than inaugurating projects: listening, coordinating and delivering.
Energy populism also pollutes
Another threat emerges during electoral cycles: simplification.
Some reduce the energy transition to an ideological enemy. Others believe merely announcing it is enough to make it happen.
Both extremes produce the same result: noise.
A real energy transition is not built through fanaticism. It is built by understanding tensions. By recognizing that an electrical system requires balance between decarbonization, reliability, affordability, regulatory stability and territorial viability.
Colombia must move beyond the false choice between technical rigor and sustainability, between growth and transition, between markets and nature. The real challenge is making those pieces function together.
That demands something far less spectacular — and far more difficult: continuity, institutional coordination, serious planning and execution capacity.
It also requires confronting one of the most destructive forces affecting any energy system: corruption.
There is no viable energy transition inside captured institutions, opaque contracting, improvised decision-making or infrastructure treated as political spoils.
Corruption does not merely divert resources. It delays projects, degrades trust, distorts priorities and weakens precisely what an energy system needs most: credibility, stability and technical capacity.
In a sector where mistakes are paid for over decades, corruption is not a secondary issue. It is a structural risk.
Clean energy cannot become another platform for political improvisation.
Much less another competition in grandstanding.
While public debate fills with slogans, the system continues accumulating real pressures: rising demand, electrification, tariff stress, new industrial loads, data centers, climate risks and the urgent need to modernize infrastructure.
The energy clock does not stop while we argue.
What the next government will inherit
Colombia’s next president will not decide whether the country enters the energy transition. That transition has already begun — and there is no turning back. Technology advanced. Climate pressure intensified. The world has already begun reorganizing its infrastructure, industry and energy security around this reality.
What the next administration will decide is how to manage it.
And that distinction matters.
Managing the transition means accelerating transmission without breaking territories. Integrating storage under clear rules. Understanding the role of gas as backup while the system matures. Reducing regulatory uncertainty. Strengthening technical institutions. Modernizing distribution networks. Rebuilding trust.
Market signals are already moving in that direction. Regional companies are reorganizing investments around renewable generation, transmission and backup capacity, understanding that real transitions are not driven by ideological purity, but by the ability to assemble viable systems.
That is why Colombia’s true risk is not simply a blackout. It is something deeper: losing strategic direction while the system enters a stage of greater technical, climatic and political complexity.
Well-managed clean energy can become a platform for competitiveness, stability and innovation. Poorly managed, it can become frustration, higher tariffs, conflict and institutional distrust.
This moment requires a more serious and responsible conversation.
Less spectacle.
Less propaganda.
Less obsession with immediate blame.
And far greater capacity to build basic agreements around something fundamental: Colombia needs a clean, resilient, modern and governable energy system.
Not to win arguments on social media.
To sustain the country.
危机
The Chinese word for crisis does not describe inevitable tragedy. It describes a crossroads.
Colombia faces real risks: improvisation, political fragmentation, corruption, climate pressure, structural delays and institutional weakness.
But it also faces extraordinary opportunity: capital flowing into the sector, strong companies, technical expertise, extraordinary natural resources and a region increasing its energy ambitions.
The question is no longer whether the energy transition will happen.
The question is whether Colombia will have the maturity — and the integrity — to build it well.
Because clean energy does not need more scattered enthusiasm.
It needs direction.
Sources and References
- BNamericas — 2026 Electric Power Capex Report
- BNamericas — Political Risk Report – April 2026
- XM — operational alerts and analysis on power supply risk and the 2026–2027 El Niño phenomenon
- IDEAM — climate projections and hydrological monitoring
- Grupo Energía Bogotá — investment and transmission expansion plans
- ISA Intercolombia — multi-year investment projections
- 2025–2026 sectoral and regulatory reports
- Media coverage and technical analysis on energy security, storage and the energy transition in Colombia and Latin America
