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In Vietnamese, one way of signaling you don’t like someone is to refer to them as “Ong”, or Mister.

So it’s not a good sign for Electricity Vietnam (EVN), the national power monopoly, when people start calling the company “Ong Dien” — Mr Electric. And especially so when they’re complaining about the rolling blackouts this summer.

“We don’t know what the government and Mr Electric have been doing, but this year we have more blackouts than before,” says Vu Thi Sao, 32, a farmer in the province of Hai Duong, 60 kilometres southeast of Hanoi.

Ms Sao is worried about her rice. The new crop needs to be planted, but there’s no electricity for the small pumps farmers use to move water from the river to their irrigation channels. Everyone in the village is furious, she says.

“Mr Electric said they were allocated only a very small amount of electricity, so who should I blame?” asks Nguyen Van Thanh, 44, a shopkeeper in a small village in Hai Duong.

Mr Thanh would normally be making 20 dollars a day this summer selling homemade ice cream, but he has no power to run his machine. “I don’t know who to blame besides Heaven.”

The thermometer in Hai Duong is hitting 35 degrees every day lately. Not a good time to lose your electric fans.

There are several reasons why EVN is short of power this summer. One was out of their control. Record droughts this winter and spring have left reservoirs at hydroelectric dams at critically low levels. The dams supply 34 per cent of Vietnam’s power.

But Vietnam saw the power crunch coming long in advance. The economy has grown 7 per cent per year since 2000, with electricity use now rising at 15 per cent per year.

The government has planned tremendous expansion in the power sector, quadrupling its coal-fired power plants by 2015. The 2,400-megawatt Son La dam comes onlinein December. The country plans 1,000 megawatts of wind turbines by 2020, along with a Russian-built nuclear power plant, the first of two.

The new capacity, however, isn’t coming online fast enough. And that, government officials concede, reflects a failure to reform the power sector to make it attractive to foreign investors. EVN’s government-regulated electricity prices, which average 8.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, are simply too cheap.

“At current electricity prices, nobody wants to invest money in it,” says former EVN deputy director Tran Quoc Anh.

The government says it cannot guarantee when the rolling blackouts will end. Each month, EVN identifies the quantity of power to be cut in each province. It turns over the necessary data to the provincial government, which in this nominally Communist country is known as the People’s Committee.

The People’s Committee then sketches out priorities and turns the decision over to the provincial Trade Department, which decides who will receive power, and who will not.

In Hai Duong Province, according to People’s Committee Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Minh, the priorities are export industries, hospitals, schools, broadcasting stations and manufacturers.

Family residences and small local businesses are not priorities.

Vu Thi Chuong, 47, a butcher in Hai Duong, says she loses power every other day, all day long. Her kids can’t sleep. Neither can the pigs.

“The price of pigs is falling, because more and more pigs are getting sick in the heat,” says Ms Chuong.

The pigs won’t breed, and the young don’t grow as fast as they should. Live pigs are down from $1.25 per kilo to $1, as farmers rush to sell their pigs for slaughter, since they’re not worth the cost to feed them. Chuong says everyone wants her to buy their pigs, but she can’t; she wouldn’t be able to sell the pork.

“People don’t want to eat much meat in this weather,” Ms Chuong says.

For some, the question is why the factories are still running, when their fans aren’t. Ice cream vendor Thanh calls it “completely unfair” that bigger businesses get power while he doesn’t. Rumors have spread that some businesses located close to power substations are using connections to EVN employees or paying bribes to keep their power supplies while the neighbourhood around them goes dark.

Tran Viet Ngai, chairman of the Vietnam Energy Association, said the rumors were “totally false.”

“No one would dare take a bribe in exchange for electricity at this time,” said the chairman. “People are paying attention to electricity, so no official would be so stupid.”

An op-ed in the newspaper Thanh Nien on Tuesday by a journalist called Ngoc Minh provided a rare open critique of government electricity policy, asking why the government was cutting off electricity to poor farmers in the countryside, who use so little, while keeping it flowing to towns and cities, where the rich keep their air-conditioning turned on all day long.

Farmer Sao has heard a different theory about what’s going on.

“China blocked the Ky Cung River so no water is running to Vietnam,” she says, referring to a river that flows from Xinjiang province in northwestern China down to Vietnam.

“Vietnam didn’t want to buy expensive electricity from China. So China blocked our water in order to pressure us to buy their electricity. We should be very careful with China. Sooner or later, this sort of thing was bound to happen.”