This Tuesday, February 20, the Environmental Assessment Commission of the Los Lagos Region will meet to approve or reject the Tineo – Nueva Ancud Transmission System project of the Canadian-Chinese company Transelec. It is a high-voltage power line, 96 kilometers long and 50 meters wide, with 251 towers, which would connect the large island of Chiloé to the mainland, crossing the Chacao channel and the communes of Ancud, Calbuco, Maullín, Puerto Montt, Puerto Varas and Llanquihue.
Social organizations, citizens and indigenous communities have expressed their concerns about the large-scale environmental impact of this project, which would affect native forests, wetlands, peatlands, migratory birds, indigenous communities and rural populations on the island and the continent. Furthermore, the project would enable the installation of more than 20 wind complexes in the area, with synergistic impacts, without having environmental and territorial planning instruments, nor indigenous consultation.
To the above, they denounce defects in the administrative procedures that evaluate the project, with the existence of revolving doors and conflicts of interest between the company and the evaluating body, clientelism over the populations impacted by the project, the lobby and political operators in key positions. .
This morning, regarding project Transmission System S/E Tineo – S/E New Ancudthe vote will be Environmental Assessment Report of the initiative Transelec in it Regional Government of Los Lagos.
The revolving door
In January 2023, the company that owns the project, Transelec, hired Paola Basaure as vice president of Corporate Affairs and Sustainability. Until May 2022, Bausare had served as Head of the Evaluation and Citizen Participation Division of the Environmental Evaluation Service, an institution where she became Deputy Executive Director and Secretary of the Committee of Ministers and in whose capacity she participated in meetings with those who shortly after They became his employers.
What’s more, with his management position at Transelec, in February 2023 Basaure took over as legal representative of Transmisora del Pacífico SA – owned by Transelec – in the environmental impact study precisely of the Tineo – Nueva Ancud project before the SEA.
Before joining Transelec, as an SEA official Basaure participated in three lobby hearings for this project. The first of them in May 2019, before the project entered environmental evaluation. The second in June 2020 when the project was presented to the SEA, three months before its entry into evaluation. The third, in April 2021, dealt with the subject “evaluation criteria in investment projects”, just in the period in which the SEA sent the company the attached report on Citizen Participation of the Consolidated Report for Request for Clarifications, Rectifications and Extensions ( ICSARA) and the company’s response through Addendum.
Already as vice president of Transelec, in February 2023 he participated in a hearing before the organization where he previously worked, that is, the SEA Los Lagos Region, on the subject “Preparation, dictation, modification, denial or rejection of administrative acts, projects of law and laws and also the decisions made by the taxpayers”, specifically for the “Indigenous Consultation process for the transmission project in the Los Lagos Region”. The regional director of the SEA, Sergio Sanhueza, attended this meeting.
But it turns out that just months before this lobby meeting, Basaure was working as Sanhueza’s direct boss in the Environmental Evaluation Service. She served as Head of the Environmental Assessment and Citizen Participation Division and he as Head of the Department of Studies and Development of the service, a unit subordinate to the head of the division.
On February 13, 2024, the Environmental Evaluation Service of the Los Lagos Region issued the Consolidated Evaluation Report, signed by its director Sergio Sanhueza, where it recommends the approval of the project by the Environmental Evaluation Commission composed of the Delegate Presidential and Regional Ministerial Secretaries.
The revolving door between Transelec and the State for this project is not new. On September 5, 2018, lawyer María José Ariztía Larraín appeared before a notary to reduce in public deed the minutes of the first meeting of the board of directors of Transmisora Chacao SA, established by Transelec to develop the high voltage project. They were Ariztía’s last days working at Transelec, since in October of that year she began working as a lawyer in the legal division of the Ministry of Energy, a job she carried out until February 2020.
Ariztía is currently a senior lawyer at Engie Chile, a company with two assets on the island: the San Pedro industrial wind complex in Dalcahue, already built and with plans to expand; and the Vientos del Archipiélago industrial wind complex in Chonchi and Castro, which is in the baseline study and anticipated relationship stage.
To prepare this report, queries were sent to both Transelec External Communications and the company’s current corporate manager, without receiving a response.
Claudia Serrano, mother of Miguel Crispi
The environmental impact study of the project, paid for by Transelec, was prepared by Gestión Ambiental Consultores (GAC). The project manager of the GAC study was the sociologist Claudia Serrano Madrid, a long-time member of the Socialist Party, former undersecretary of Social Development, Minister of Labor and ambassador to the OECD in the governments of former President Bachelet.
Serrano’s son is Miguel Crispi, founder of the Democratic Revolution Party and current chief of advisors to President Boric. While his spouse, Patricio Tapia, a former socialist activist, was municipal administrator and deputy mayor of Puerto Montt during 2022, while the project was being evaluated. In this commune the project aims to locate 55 high voltage towers.
In November 2022, Serrano participated, representing Transelec, in a hearing with the governor of the Los Lagos Region, Patricio Vallespín, to “delve into key aspects of the Tineo-Ancud Project for the decarbonization goals of the State of Chile.”
Transelec’s lobbying and community relations were carried out by the consulting firm Allard & Partners, directed by architect Pablo Allard Serrano, former urban planning advisor to President Piñera at the Tantauco Group. In 2021, Allard was part of the Consultative Committee convened by the Ministry of Energy to strategically advise the update of the National Energy Policy, an instance in which Arturo Le Blanc, current general manager of Transelec, also participated.
In September 2022, his brother Francisco Allard participated, representing Transelec in a hearing before the Presidential Delegate in the Los Lagos Region, Giovanna Moreira, maintaining the importance of the project for the country’s decarbonization goals. Between August and September 2022, he held three hearings before the Regional Ministerial Secretaries of Economy, Public Works, and Housing and Urban Planning for the “Master Plan that will propose the Tineo Ancud project, a key impulse for local development in the Chacao Crossing.”
In January 2023, he held a hearing with the person in charge of the Coastal Maritime Spaces of Native Peoples (ECMPO) of the legal division of the Undersecretary of Fisheries and Aquaculture, discussing this Plan and also the application of the Lafkenche Law in the area.
The “Territorial Master Plan of the Chacao Canal” is one of Transelec’s voluntary commitments within the framework of the Environmental Impact Study. Allard & Partners has already carried out workshops on this Plan in localities in the area, without having the environmental qualification of the project and in parallel with the indigenous consultation.
Clientism in Ancud
In July 2020, at a citizen request, the Comptroller General of the Republic ruled on a Facebook publication from the official account of the Municipality of Ancud, in which it congratulated Transelec for the delivery of food boxes to 70 families in a rural sector of the commune in the month of May.
The Comptroller’s Office concluded that the “municipality of Ancud must refrain from making publications such as those of its kind on social networks.” In that rural sector, the company built the Nueva Ancud electrical substation, an integral element of the Tineo-Nueva Ancud high voltage system and which was entered into the SEIA through an Environmental Impact Declaration.
However, days after the Comptroller’s statement, the Municipal Delegation of Chacao published on its social networks a new food delivery, “a contribution in ‘Food Boxes’, which Transelec made coordinated through the I. Municipality of Ancud some community and indigenous organizations” from the Chacao sector. According to what was published, the company, the Office of Indigenous Affairs and the mayor “joined forces and criteria to make this donation”, in a sector where, if the project is approved, some of the 66 high voltage towers that would cross the commune would be installed. from Ancud. The delivery of food in boxes with the company logo on the outside occurred four months before the start of the citizen participation procedure for the environmental impact assessment.
The actions between the company and the municipality were extended to the year 2021. According to the 2021 Public Account of the Illustrious Municipality of Ancud, the “Area of health, education and child care” of the Municipal Corporation, executed the “Villa Chacao School” project “Transelec Heating System Improvement” for an amount of $3,550,448. Both the Municipality and the Municipal Corporation were consulted by the Transparency Law about the origin of this money and the corresponding public-private collaboration agreement. The Municipality did not respond and referred the query to the Municipal Corporation, but it did not respond to any of the requests.
The mayor of Ancud, Carlos Gómez, had been publicly denounced in 2020 by social organizations, after hiring Patricio Peñaloza, one of the main operators of the Chiloé wind project, which intends to be built in the Mar Brava sector, as an advisor.
Project objectives
Asked about this project in March 2023, the Regional Ministerial Secretary (Seremi) of Energy of the Los Lagos Region, Liliana Alarcón, rejected referring to the project of the new high voltage line, because she is a member of the Environmental Assessment Commission that must approve or reject the project this Tuesday.
The Seremi of Energy, which currently replaces the Seremi of the Environment, stated that they have been in Castro and Ancud “meeting with different communities to be able to bring together in a certain way the information on electricity generation in Chiloé, the possibilities of participation, because it is necessary to asymmetric the information so that the evaluation process has the possibility of having all eyes on it.”
However, from an indigenous community affected by the project, they affirm that when the seremi and officials from the secretariat met with the communities to inform about the project, they rejected that a scenario of wind farms on the island: “That is fake news” responded from the seremi, ignoring what was reported by the National Electrical Commission in its planning for the expansion of electrical transmission in 2017, which points out the importance of this project for the authorization of wind projects in Chiloé.
Extension of deadlines
According to Decree 17T of the Ministry of Energy, published on November 30, 2018, Transelec had 60 months to commission the work, a deadline that would be met on November 30, 2023. It also had to obtain the favorable Environmental Qualification Resolution no later than April 16, 2022. On September 23, 2020, the company submitted its environmental impact assessment study, which was admitted by the environmental authority on the 30th of the same month.
In October 2020, Transelec requested the Ministry of Energy to increase the deadline to meet the project’s milestones, arguing that the pandemic was a force majeure event that impacted the environmental evaluation procedure. Through letters to the authority, Transelec requested a 393-day increase in the deadline for the Tineo – Ancud line.
The company argued that to calculate the deadline extension it should be counted from March 20, 2020, when the national management of the Environmental Evaluation Service suspended environmental procedures due to the pandemic.
However, in its Exempt Ministerial Resolution 7/2022, the Ministry of Energy responded that to calculate the deadline extension it should be counted from the date on which the company had entered its project into the Environmental Impact Assessment System (SEIA). Furthermore, the suspension decreed by the SEA was not an impediment for the company to have entered its study in that period. Thus, the project’s environmental evaluation procedure had only been suspended for 80 days. For this reason, it decided to partially accept the request, extending the commissioning of the work for 80 days.
Dissatisfied with the resolution, Transelec filed an appeal for reconsideration with the ministry. Likewise, he held a lobby hearing to discuss said appeal with the head of the Legal Division of the Ministry of Energy. The company requested an additional extension of 184 days, corresponding to the number of days in which the national management of the SEA suspended the procedures: from March 20 to September 20, 2020. Transelec claimed to have its environmental impact study ready for entry. in March 2020. The statement was not accompanied by the environmental impact study document with that date, but rather by circumstantial elements.
In Exempt Ministerial Resolution No. 3 of January 13, 2023, signed by the Minister of Energy, Diego Pardow, the appeal was partially accepted. Based on circumstantial elements, the resolution infers that the company had the study before March 20, 2020, despite the fact that it only made it public on September 23 of that year. Furthermore, the resolution indicates that the system was unable to carry out useful procedures due to the pandemic, although the SEIA entry mechanism was operational.
Under this assumption, the ministry recognized that a “force majeure event that affected the fulfillment of Milestone No. 2 in 253 consecutive days, has generated a ‘domino effect’ that also impacts the rest of the schedule of Stage 2 of the Project.” The ministry determined new deadlines: December 1, 2023 to obtain the Environmental Qualification Resolution; on August 9, 2024 for the commissioning of the project.
Environmental organizations, indigenous communities and citizens have confirmed these events, which they describe as serious vices and irregularities, because they would express a collusion of public institutions with private interests that leaves them helpless in the face of the environmental effects that they will suffer if the project is approved.
Read the documents here:
Ministerial Exempt Resolution 07 02-18-2022 Pacific Transmitter –
Constitution of the Public Limited Company and Minutes of the first Transmitting Meeting of Chacao
RES_EXM_0003_2023 ORDINARY_IMA_299__1_
Decree-17_30-NOV-2018 Establishes rights and obligations for the execution and exploitation of new work on the Nuevo Puerto Montt Line
National Energy Commission – Exempt Resolution No. 131 of March 20, 2017. Approves Expansion Plan of the National Transmission System
National Energy Commission – Exempt Decree No. 422, of August 18, 2017. Establishes the expansion plan of the national transmission system for the 12 months CNE –
Report January 2017. Needs of the national transmission system for the following twelve months