No movie watching after 9:00 PM. What?!

Venezuela has an electricity deficiency and it's running out of it.

The latest attempt to avoid this problem is with a new regulation that mandates the shutting down of shopping centers and malls, including anything that is inside except for casinos, by 9:00 PM "until further notice". One serious problem is that most of the major movie theaters in Venezuela are attached to a mall, which means that everyone must be out of the last movie by 9:00 PM for the theater to shut down on time. Now movies can't start no later than 6:30 PM, and if it's something longer like Avatar you might as well go on the weekend or skip the afternoon at work.

For years Venezuela has been known to have an electricity deficiency to the point that any clock plugged into the wall would be slow within a year (not enough power to make them tick fully). I've noticed for years that while I've been here streets lights seem very dim and occasionally there are serious electricity fluctuations at home; electricity-dependent devices wear/break down really easily, and it's best to plug them to something more serious than a surge strip. There were some serious blackouts before my arrival, to the point where, for example, tuesdays and thursday afternoons had no electricity in homes.

There a few reasons why this has become a more serious problem recently:

1. A couple of years ago, the time was changed to be more half an hour sooner (from GMT -4:00 to GMT -4:30) to allegedly have more even sunlight throughout the whole country. Unfortunately, aside from causing perpetual confusion for everyone, it also means that the sun goes down much much sooner than expected, especially while people are at work, which means that lights will go on earlier and last longer, including in shopping centers and malls.
2. One of the main sources of power for this country comes from a hydroelectric dam named Guri, one of the largest dams in the world, and because of drought this year (thanks, El Niño) the water levels aren't high enough to produce enough electricity.
3. And not to mention that there's probably a whole lot more people using inefficient air conditioners (windows are not really sealed around here), running more TVs, computers, internet, etc. You can't run the 21st century without a lot of electricity!
4. Probably more complex reasons I don't know about.

I haven't been told how they're really solving this problem aside from regulating the use of electricity. The government is not really very transparent about what they're doing aside from boasting about new things and ideas that will cause problems (solving problems isn't sexy enough).

Venezuela also has rich sources of sunlight (It's Always Sunny in Venezuela) and wind (lots of coast) that could also be used to generate clean, modern electricity, but my guess is that the government is going to sit there and wait until someone comes and installs the facilities to get electricity from those sources.