The government of Brazil He said that he will ask the Federal Police to investigate the massive blackout that affected almost the entire country on Tuesday for about six hours.
“I am absolutely convinced that the National System Operator (ONS) can’t tell yet if these facts were eminently technical, or if there was also human error or even fraud“said the Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira.
At a press conference, Silveira explained that the sector is “highly strategic, sensitive and fundamental” and revealed that the Executive only has information on one overload in a power transmission line in Cearáwhich caused the collapse of the system in the North and Northeast regions.
When this occurred, the ONS modulated the payload that was being sent to the South, Southeast, and Midwest, as a form of protection, which caused power to drop in these regions.
There were at least 16,000 megawatts (MW) of power outages.
Cut of 25% of the system
Before the conference, the minister had reported that the national energy system “It was restored at 2:30 p.m., missing specific adjustments that distribution companies have to make in some cities.”
The blackout began at 8:30 a.m., when the cut in almost 25 percent of the total system It generated cuts at various points, although the situation began to normalize at 9 a.m. and around noon power had already been recovered in the south, southeast and center-west of the country, according to the state news agency Brasil.
In addition to internal investigations of the ons and the National Electric Power Agency (Aneel), the Government asked the Ministry of Justice and Public Security for the Federal Police and the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin) to investigate the incident in detail.
According to Silveira, the ONS will still evaluate if there was another event at the same time, in another part of the country.
“The only event that can be said is this one in Ceará. There is still no other event indicated by the ONS, but it is assumed that we had a second event that caused this event of this magnitude,” he reported.
“Thanks to the robustness of our system, for an event of this magnitude to occur, there must be a redundancy of relevant events,” he said.according to the state Agencia Brasil.
According to the MME, in the South, Southeast and Central West regions, power returned about an hour after the interruption and in the North and Northeast regions, the supply was fully restored at 2:49 p.m.
The blackout reached 25 states and the Federal District. The only state that was not affected was Roraima, which is not part of the National Interconnected System. Around 27 million people were affected, representing a third of Brazilian consumers.
The blackout caused problems in the metro in cities such as São Paulo and Salvador de Bahía and chaos in the streets of other capitals because the traffic lights stopped working, but in general they were minor incidents.
Source: Ambito
