Guatemala Reservoir Transparency

Chixoy reservoir (INDE, 300 MW, 460 Mm³) effective storage percentage is published weekly by MEM in its 'Informe de Monitoreo Semanal del Sector Energético', and the Amatitlán reservoir level appears in CNEE weekly market monitoring PDFs. However, these are the only two reservoirs with any published storage data. Guatemala has roughly 1,513 MW of installed hydroelectric capacity distributed across scores of private plants; none of those publish storage or inflow data publicly. INSIVUMEH publishes river-level bulletins for natural watercourses but does not report reservoir storage volumes. INDE does not operate its own open data portal. No real-time dashboard exists.

All published reservoir data is embedded as charts or tables inside PDF documents — MEM weekly reports and CNEE monthly/annual PDFs. No REST API, no open data endpoint, and no machine-readable download (CSV, JSON, Excel) is offered for reservoir storage data by any Guatemalan public body. The datos.gob.gt open data portal contains no reservoir or hydropower storage datasets. AMM (grid operator) publishes generation statistics via PDF and a Power BI dashboard but does not expose reservoir levels. Direct PDF URLs on mem.gob.gt and cnee.gob.gt return HTTP 403 when accessed programmatically, suggesting bot-blocking. Registration is not formally required, but extracting the data demands manual PDF scraping.

v1.3.0 capacity-weighted with conservative estimation applied 2026-05-29. Guatemala's total reservoir capacity above 10 hm³ is approximately 3,500 Mm³, including Chixoy (~460 Mm³ gross, operated by INDE/EGEE), the Hidroeléctrica del Río Madre Vieja group, and a long tail of smaller hydropower and irrigation reservoirs. MEM weekly reports cover Chixoy effective storage and CNEE monitoring captures Amatitlán — capacity-weighted covered storage ≈ 1,225 Mm³ on a conservative basis. Coverage = round(100 × 1,225 / 3,500) = 35. The conservative downward revision from 43 reflects that only two reservoirs (Chixoy and Amatitlán) appear in any structured public reporting, that the private hydropower fleet (Xacbal, Aguacapa, Renace I–IV, and dozens of smaller projects representing ~80% of installed capacity) publishes no storage data, that all data is locked in PDFs, and that no per-reservoir disclosure exists for smaller irrigation/water-supply reservoirs.

CNEE weekly market monitoring PDFs appear to have been archived since at least 2010, and the annual CNEE Statistical Compendiums (Compendio Estadístico) cover multi-year series, the 2024 edition and the 2024-2025 edition being the most recent found. Annual MEM monitoring reports cover 2023 and 2024. However, all historical data is locked inside PDF files with no unified longitudinal database for download. Charts of Chixoy effective storage show multiple years of weekly data, suggesting 10–15 years of records exist in aggregate across scattered PDFs, but extracting a continuous machine-readable historical series requires manual effort across hundreds of documents. INSIVUMEH does not publish reservoir-specific historical storage series.

MEM publishes weekly energy sector monitoring reports that include the Chixoy effective storage percentage, making this the most frequent public update cadence found for any Guatemalan reservoir. CNEE also publishes weekly and monthly market monitoring PDFs including the Chixoy and Amatitlán reservoir elevations. However, all updates are PDF-embedded and are not pushed to any live dashboard or data feed. No daily or near-real-time data is publicly accessible. The weekly cadence is a meaningful positive, scored above regional peers that publish only annually, but the purely-PDF delivery and absence of any streaming data channel cap the score.

No public document describing how Chixoy or Amatitlán reservoir levels are measured has been found. INDE operates the instrumentation at Chixoy but publishes no sensor specifications, calibration records, datum references, or data-quality protocols online. INSIVUMEH describes its hydrometric network in general terms (river gauging stations) but does not publish protocols for dam-reservoir level monitoring. CNEE references 'nivel de embalse' and 'cota' metrics in its reports but provides no accompanying methodological annex. The 2015 CNEE analysis of El Niño impact on Chixoy generation cited in search results does not appear to contain measurement methodology. Guatemala has no publicly accessible dam-safety monitoring framework documentation equivalent to international best practice.

All reservoir storage data, monitoring reports, statistical compendiums, and hydrological bulletins are published exclusively in Spanish. CNEE maintains a partial English-language homepage (cnee.gob.gt/en/) but its data sections, PDF reports, and monitoring archives are entirely in Spanish. INSIVUMEH, MEM, INDE, AMM, and datos.gob.gt offer no English-language interfaces or translated datasets. No metadata, variable labels, or data dictionaries are available in English. International researchers or investors cannot access Guatemala reservoir data without Spanish-language proficiency.