A large blackout leaves a large part of Brazil without electricity for hours

Users of the Sao Paulo subway were affected by the blackout in Brazil, on August 15, 2023. COURTESY

Millions of Brazilians had breakfast this Tuesday in the dark. A blackout affected a good part of the country throughout the morning. The stoppage in the electricity supply began at half past eight in the morning, and in ten minutes the national system lost 16,000 megawatts of load, 25% of the usual energy. After noon the situation had been restored in a large part of the territory, although the north and northeast were still affected. It was not a total blackout, its intensity was variable.

In São Paulo and Salvador de Bahía, the subway trains ran slower than usual; in the State of Piauí, the electricity cut forced the suspension of the water supply. In cities like Fortaleza or Belo Horizonte there was some chaos in traffic because the traffic lights stopped working. Beyond this type of event, no serious incidents were recorded. The cut was noticed to a greater or lesser extent in almost all the states, with the exception of Roraima, in the north, which is the only one that is not connected to the national network. For a long time it imported energy from neighboring Venezuela, but now it supports itself with its own thermal power plants.

The Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira, who was in Paraguay to accompany President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the inauguration of President Santiago Peña, announced that he was returning to Brazil in a hurry to closely monitor the situation. He promised the “quick restoration of services” and “due investigation of the reasons that led to the power outage,” he said on X, formerly Twitter.

The causes of the blackout are unknown, but at the moment everything points to a technical failure. According to technicians quoted by the local press, the drop in supply originated in a substation near the huge Belo Monte dam, in the Amazon, which supplies energy to all of Brazil. The main energy source of the South American power is hydroelectric, so when the water level in the dams is low, all alarms go off. But this is not the cause this time, as explained by the coordinator of the National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters, José Marengo: “Despite the low level of rainfall, we are not in a situation of extreme drought, mainly in the northeast region , which is where the blackout started,” he explained.

The last time Brazil experienced a blackout of these characteristics, on a national scale, was in March 2018, although the most traumatic episode occurred in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, when a substation in the remote Amazonian state of Amapá caught fire, leaving all the region in the dark. The solution was slow in coming: almost 800,000 people had to live without electricity for ten days.

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