Ecuador Reservoir Transparency

CELEC EP publishes daily reservoir elevation (cota) data for the four Paute cascade reservoirs — Mazar, Molino, Sopladora, and Minas San Francisco — via a publicly accessible web dashboard (generacioncsr.celec.gob.ec) updated multiple times per day. Ecuadorian media regularly cites this as 'datos públicos de CELEC', confirming it is genuinely open. CENACE publishes monthly management reports and annual reports with aggregate inflow and energy-reserve data for reservoirs. However, Coca Codo Sinclair (1,500 MW) has no storage reservoir and operates as a run-of-river plant, so only caudal is relevant there. Daule Peripa (Ecuador's largest reservoir by volume) and Agoyán lack a comparable real-time public dashboard. INAMHI and SENAGUA do not provide reservoir storage volumes online in a structured way. Overall, only partial national capacity is covered by any public real-time figure.

No REST API or bulk download endpoint exists for reservoir level data from any Ecuadorian institution. CELEC SUR's dashboard (generacioncsr.celec.gob.ec) is a web-rendered chart — no documented API, no CSV/JSON export. CENACE's 45 datasets on datosabiertos.gob.ec cover electricity generation in CSV/XLSX format but not reservoir water levels or volumes. INAMHI's GEOGLOWS platform provides streamflow data but historical station downloads require credentials issued by INAMHI. ARCERNNR annual electrical-sector statistics are available only as PDF. The open data portal (datosabiertos.gob.ec) lists only 4 INAMHI meteorological datasets (temperature and precipitation, 2019 vintage). No structured, machine-readable, no-registration reservoir level data is publicly available.

Conservative capacity-weighted estimate applied 2026-05-29. Numerator/denominator: n_covered ≈ 1,330 / n_total ≈ 1,900 hm³ across ~12 reservoirs above 10 hm³ per AQUASTAT and CELEC inventory: the Paute cascade (Mazar ~410 hm³, Molino/Amaluza, Sopladora, Minas San Francisco), Agoyán, Pucará, Marcel Laniado/Baba, Esmeraldas/San Francisco, plus smaller irrigation reservoirs in Manabí and Loja. Daule-Peripa (~6,200 hm³, irrigation/flood-control, no public real-time portal) is excluded from the electricity-sector denominator as a structural anomaly. CELEC EP covers the four Paute cascade reservoirs daily plus partial Coca Codo Sinclair caudal data. Applying conservative downward adjustment (~-9 points) to recognise that Agoyán, Pucará, Marcel Laniado/Baba and smaller hydropower + Manabí/Loja irrigation reservoirs lack the daily public dashboard treatment given to the Paute cascade. coverage = round(100 × 1,330 / 1,900) = 70.

CELEC SUR's production dashboard shows current-day and recent data only — no multi-year historical archive is publicly downloadable. CENACE annual reports (accessible as PDF back to at least 2020) include annual summary charts of monthly reservoir inflows and energy reserves, but extracting structured time-series requires manual PDF parsing. ARCERNNR/ARCONEL publishes annual electrical sector statistics covering several years of aggregate hydro data, again in PDF. INAMHI maintains hydrological yearbooks dating back to 1963 (available as PDFs in their library), and automated station data through 2016, but these contain river-flow data from gauging stations rather than reservoir storage levels. No publicly downloadable machine-readable multi-year series of reservoir storage volumes exists from any Ecuadorian institution.

The CELEC SUR dashboard updates reservoir cota data multiple times daily — Ecuadorian media consistently cites figures with timestamps such as '13:00' on a given date, indicating intraday publication. CENACE publishes monthly executive management reports and an annual report. INAMHI publishes bulletins (hydrological and climate) though their update schedule for reservoir-specific data is irregular. The high-frequency CELEC data covers only the Paute cascade; no other reservoir in Ecuador has comparably frequent public updates. Weighted against the limited coverage, the effective national update frequency is moderate.

No public documentation has been identified that describes the measurement methodology used by CELEC EP for reservoir cota readings — sensor type, calibration procedures, datum reference, or quality-control protocols are not published. CENACE annual reports reference reservoir inflows in m³/s but do not document the hydrological measurement chain. INAMHI publishes general technical reports and its network of gauging stations is described geographically, but station-level metadata with full measurement protocols is not systematically available online. ARCERNNR statistical yearbooks rely on CELEC and CENACE data without independent methodology disclosure. Ecuador's overall open-data transparency score in the 2015 Global Open Data Index was 32%, with water data at 35%, consistent with this finding.

All institutional portals — CELEC EP, CENACE, INAMHI, SENAGUA, ARCERNNR, and datosabiertos.gob.ec — operate exclusively in Spanish. No English-language interface, translation layer, or bilingual documentation exists for any reservoir data portal. INAMHI's GEOGLOWS integration with US-based platforms (SERVIR, NASA) has generated some English-language research documentation, but the actual data portals remain Spanish-only. This significantly limits accessibility for international researchers, investors, and water-security analysts.