(Photo: Still from a video showing the power outage in Argentina on June 16, 2019. Credit: @lucas_m_rod on Twitter)An investigation has been launched into the massive nationwide power outage that hit Argentina on June 16 and rippled into neighboring countries, including Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil. Tens of millions of customers lost electricity for hours and thousands remained without power the next day.
Argentina’s energy secretary said that the outage happened at about 7 am local time when a key interconnection system collapsed, the Associated Press reported.
“Public transportation ground to a halt in Buenos Aires, a city of 16 million people, phone and internet communications went down, water supplies were cut off, and shops were forced to close,” according to the Telegraph. “Hospitals had to rely on generators.”
Cammesa, a company that coordinates the sale and delivery of electricity in the country, released a memo suggesting that problems with at least two 500-kilovolt transmission lines were the proximate cause of the blackouts, IEEE Spectrum’s Amy Nordrum wrote this week.
“According to the company, a short circuit disconnected a 500-kV transmission line that runs from the city of Colonia Elía to Belgrano, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires,” she wrote. “And it appears that, at the same time, an automated system disconnected another 500-kV line that runs from the city of Mercedes to Colonia Elía.” It’s unclear why that second disconnection happened, she continued.
In April, a third 500-kV line was taken out of service to relocate a tower, the memo said.
“Overconfidence in the capacity of a single transmission line may have played a role,”Associated Press journalist Almudena Calatrava wrote on Wednesday.
“This is an unprecedented case that will be investigated thoroughly,” Argentine President Mauricio Macri vowed on Twitter, according to the Associated Press. Argentine Energy Secretary Gustavo Lopetegui told reporters in Buenos Aires that, while a cyber attack wasn’t the primary hypothesis, it couldn’t be ruled out, Bloomberg reported.
United States industry experts told AP writers Tom Krisher and Luis Andres Henao that the outage should have been limited.
“When a fault occurs on a line ‘you try to isolate the fault and not let it spread to three times the size of Texas,’ said Alan Mantooth, director of the National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission and a University of Arkansas electrical engineering professor,” the journalists wrote. “Most systems have sensors to detect power surges or shortages and software that can take generators offline or reroute electricity. But Argentina’s system apparently didn’t react fast enough.”
The experts told the AP writers that, in the United States, Congress passed a law setting reliability standards after the Northeast power outage of 2003. Europe has similar precautions.
