The Fire Of The Main Substation Makes Brazil Blackout

UNSPLASH/FRE SONveld ILLUSTRATION

JAKARTA - The fire at the substation owned by Brazilian company Eletrobras caused a blackout in several areas of Brazil. More than 1 million customers were affected.

A fire incident occurred at a reactor at a substation in southern Brazil. As a result, there was a power cut that exported around 5,000 MW throughout Brazil, the country's energy operator, ONS said.

In the Southern region, fires resulted in a loss of loads of about 1,600 MW. In other areas, an automatic protection mechanism is activated, which is designed to cut power when the system needs to be rebalanced due to interference.

The Northeast region experienced disturbances of around 1,900 MW, the North region of 1,600 MW, and the Southeast region of 4,800 MW.

Brazil's Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira, called the power outage an isolated event that did not occur due to energy shortages, but infrastructure problems.

"We have better energy resilience. This is a one-time incident that OTS immediately responded to," Silveira said in an interview on local television as reported by Reuters, October 14.

OTS noted that equipment recovery and load recovery were carried out safely in the first few minutes. All expenses are restored within 2.5 hours.

Eletrobras said it would cooperate with OTS to identify the cause of the incident. ONS will investigate the causes of wider disruption to the national interconnection system.

Power distributors across the country, such as Lightu and Enel Sao Paulo, reported at least 1.3 million people affected by blackouts.