H1 2026 Evaluation
Venezuela Reservoir Transparency
F1Opaque — Ranked #160 out of 167 countries
weight 30%
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weight 15%
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weight 8%
weight 5%
Primary source evaluated
Dimension breakdown
Data Availability
20% of total score
No current storage volume for Guri or any major Venezuelan hydropower reservoir is publicly accessible online from any official source. CORPOELEC (corpoelec.gob.ve) publishes no hydrological data whatsoever — its website is limited to billing, customer service, and press releases. Crucially, CORPOELEC removed Guri reservoir levels from its website in May 2016 and has not reinstated them. A 2025 LinkedIn analysis confirmed this withdrawal, noting researchers must rely on the US-operated G-REALM satellite altimetry database instead. INAMEH publishes monthly hydrological bulletins (PDF) covering river stages at five Orinoco-basin gauging stations, but these bulletins do not include reservoir storage volumes for the Guri, Macagua, Caruachi, or Tocoma impoundments. The Ministry of Water (MINAGUAS) issued a December 2025 press release mentioning 51 monitored water bodies, but provided only anecdotal narrative — no figures for Guri or any major hydropower reservoir. Current Guri levels are obtained exclusively through anonymous engineer leaks to journalists, social media posts, or satellite altimetry from external agencies.
Technical Accessibility
15% of total score
No REST API, no open data portal, no machine-readable dataset of any kind exists for Venezuelan reservoir data. CORPOELEC's website offers only HTML customer-service pages. INAMEH's PDF bulletins are scanned or non-structured documents inaccessible via HTTPS due to expired TLS certificates on the inameh.gob.ve domain. Venezuela's national open data initiative (CNTI datos-abiertos) contains CNTI budget and training records (2011–2020) but no hydrological or energy datasets. No registration would help — the data simply does not exist in any downloadable form. The progressive dismantling of the national hydrological monitoring network (weather stations looted or abandoned since 2004, INAMEH climatologist confirming 'intermittent' measurements as of 2024) means even the underlying data collection is severely degraded.
Coverage
30% of total score
v1.3.0 capacity-weighted: coverage = round(100 × covered_capacity_hm³ / total_national_capacity_hm³). Venezuela's total reservoir capacity above 10 hm³ is approximately 140,000 Mm³, dominated overwhelmingly by Guri (~135,000 Mm³, ~96% of national capacity) plus the Caroní cascade (Macagua, Caruachi, Tocoma), the Andean Uribante-Caparo system in Táchira, and water-supply reservoirs (La Mariposa, Lagartijo) serving Caracas. CORPOELEC removed Guri storage levels from its website in May 2016 and has never reinstated them; INAMEH publishes monthly river-stage bulletins for five Orinoco-basin stations only, with no reservoir storage volumes for Guri or any other dam. Covered capacity by Venezuelan official sources = 0 Mm³. Coverage = round(100 × 0 / 140,000) = 0. The G-REALM satellite altimetry record (USDA/NASA) provides the only continuous proxy for Guri water levels but is a third-party international resource and is excluded from official capacity-weighted coverage.
Historical Depth
13% of total score
No machine-readable historical archive of Venezuelan reservoir storage exists from official sources. Researchers accessing Guri data historically relied on data compiled by the Grupo Ricardo Zuloaga from CORPOELEC covering only 2012–2016 before the website removal, supplemented by the G-REALM satellite record available since September 1992. INAMEH river-stage PDFs are published monthly but are not machine-readable and TLS certificate failures prevent reliable access. The systematic deterioration of the monitoring network — with data gaps during the COVID pandemic and ongoing vandalism of field stations — means even the underlying historical record has holes. Academic studies reference EDELCA/CORPOELEC internal data from 2004 and earlier, but these are not publicly available. The score of 6 reflects the G-REALM satellite-derived proxy record (1992–present) as the only continuous machine-readable historical signal, even though this is not a Venezuelan government publication.
Update Frequency
10% of total score
CORPOELEC has not published routine Guri levels since May 2016, a withdrawal that has now persisted for nearly a decade. INAMEH's PDF bulletins are published monthly but cover river stage only (not reservoir storage), and multiple bulletins in 2024–2025 were inaccessible due to certificate failures. MINAGUAS and MIPPCI issue occasional press releases about the electricity sector, but these are irregular propaganda-style announcements with no numerical data and no fixed schedule. Engineer José Aguilar (cited by multiple analysts) estimated CORPOELEC 'owes the country 5,659 daily operational reports' since December 2010 — a figure that illustrates the scale of the reporting deficit. The score of 5 reflects that INAMEH's monthly river-stage bulletins technically exist as a recurring publication.
Methodological Transparency
8% of total score
No measurement methodology is published for Guri or any other Venezuelan hydropower reservoir. CORPOELEC does not document how water levels are measured, what instrumentation is used, what datum is referenced, or how storage volumes are calculated from water-surface elevation. INAMEH's bulletins do not explain measurement methods for the river gauging stations they report. An ABB engineering document from 1978 (cited in independent research) provided historical technical specifications for the Guri dam, but this is proprietary infrastructure documentation, not a published government methodology. Chatham House (2021) and Frontiers (2020) both noted the 'opacity' and 'shady management' of the Venezuelan electricity sector as systemic rather than incidental. The score of 5 reflects that INAMEH's existence as a formal institution implies some measurement standards are in use internally, even if none are published.
Language and Usability
5% of total score
Spanish is Venezuela's official language and all government publications are exclusively in Spanish. No English-language interface exists for CORPOELEC, INAMEH, or MINAGUAS. This dimension would ordinarily penalise countries for lack of English, but since virtually no data is published at all, the language barrier is secondary to total data absence. A score of 10 (vs. 0) reflects that the INAMEH bulletin PDFs are technically in a single language (Spanish) that at least a large international research community can access — marginally better than countries publishing only in scripts inaccessible to most researchers.
Evaluator notes
Venezuela presents one of the most extreme reservoir data transparency failures globally, made especially consequential by the scale of the infrastructure involved. The Guri reservoir (135,000 Mm³, ~73% of national electricity) is among the world's five largest by storage volume and is a critical global energy security asset — yet no official real-time or recent storage data is publicly accessible. CORPOELEC explicitly removed Guri water levels from its website in May 2016, at the height of a national electricity crisis, and has never reinstated them. The Maduro government's pattern of suppressing unfavourable operational data is well-documented across multiple sectors (epidemiological data publication was halted in 2018; economic statistics are routinely suppressed) and extends fully to the electricity sector. The 2019 nationwide blackout — which left 32 million people without power for days — occurred without any official advance warning of reservoir or transmission system deterioration, a direct consequence of this opacity. The institutional infrastructure for monitoring has also physically deteriorated. Caracas Chronicles documented in April 2025 that at least 148 historical weather stations in Guayana and the Venezuelan Amazon have been looted or abandoned, with one INAMEH climatologist confirming measurements are 'intermittent at best'. INAMEH continues publishing monthly river-stage bulletins for five Orinoco-basin stations, but these do not include reservoir storage volumes for any of the Caroní cascade impoundments (Guri, Macagua, Caruachi). The underlying monitoring network is sufficiently degraded that even internal data quality is questionable. The G-REALM satellite altimetry record operated by USDA/NASA provides the only continuous, independent proxy for Guri water levels available to researchers. A meaningful improvement in Venezuela's RTI score would require, at minimum: restoration of daily Guri storage level publication by CORPOELEC (as was done before 2016), publication of INAMEH's Caroní basin station data with reservoir storage conversion, and commitment to a regular update schedule. The political conditions under the Maduro government make this unlikely in the near term, and the physical degradation of field infrastructure would require years of investment to reverse even under a reform scenario.
Evaluated by Jaime Delgado · 2026-09-15 · Methodology v1.3.0