Massive blackout caused by failure in grid, Argentine gov’t says

Buenos Aires — A “collapse” in the Argentine Interconnection System (SADI) caused the “massive outage in electric energy” across Argentina and Uruguay, the Energy Secretariat said Sunday.

President Mauricio Macri said the outage was being “fully investigated.”

“This morning there was an outage in electric energy in all the country due to a failure in the transportation system from the (northeast) coast, whose cause we still cannot determine. We are working so that everyone can have energy as soon as possible,” the president said in a Twitter post.

About 50 percent of electric customers currently have power and “service will be restored to everyone” over the next few hours, Macri said.

Electric utility Edesur said earlier in the day that restoration of service had started “slowly” following the massive blackout, which affected most of Argentina and parts of Uruguay and Paraguay.

The company said on social media that its control center had started the work of “normalization and slowly started restoring electric energy service to the grid,” which was providing electricity to just “the first 34,000 customers.”

“It’s going to take some hours, because in addition to the cause still not being clear, getting the generation and transmission back online so that it reaches every home will take several hours,” Edesur spokeswoman Alejandra Martinez told Radio Mitre.

The power outage started around 7:00 am due to “a massive failure in the electric interconnection system, which left all of Argentina and Uruguay without energy,” Edesur said.

Traffic signals went out, affecting transportation across the region.

Uruguayan state-owned electric utility (UTE) said that parts of the country were affected by the outage in Argentina.

“At 7:06, a problem in the Argentine grid affected the interconnected system, leaving all of the national territory without service, as well as several provinces in the neighboring country,” UTE said in a Twitter post, adding that “in light of the significant regional outage, the system is being restarted from zero.”

UTE spokesman Ariel Ferragut told EFE that the utility company was “slowly restoring” electric service across “all of the country.”

The state-owned utility still does not know what caused the outage, Ferragut said.

An EFE reporter confirmed that street lights and traffic signals were out in some parts of Montevideo, while they functioned in other areas.

Carrasco International Airport was able to continue operating without problems, aviation officials said.

The Paraguayan National Electricity Administration (ANDE) said in a statement that the outage in Argentina and Uruguay caused “the blockage of seven generating units at the Yacyreta Hydroelectric Complex.”

Yacyreta is shared by Paraguay and Argentina, and the outage affected some cities in southern Paraguay, ANDE said in a statement.

The electric utilities operating in southern Brazil, meanwhile, said that the blackout had not affected them.

Companhia Estadual de Energia Eletrica (CEEE) and Rio Grande Energia, which serve all of southern Brazil, said they were operating normally.

ie/hv