12 November 2009 - Brazil's energy minister has defended the reliability of his nation's power grid after a huge blackout left nearly 60m people in the dark and raised concerns about its ability to guarantee electricity for a surging economy.
The Associated Press reported that energy minister Edison Lobao said the hours-long blackout on 10 November was caused by heavy rain, lightning and strong winds that made transformers on a vital high-voltage transmission line short circuit, leading two other lines to go down as part of an automatic safety mechanism.
The massive Itaipu dam on the border with Paraguay - the world's second-largest hydroelectric power producer - was completely shut down for the first time in its 25-year history during the blackout, but Loboa stressed the plant was not the problem.
"The problem was exclusively with the transmission lines," said Lobao.
The blackout cut electricity to 18 of Brazil's 26 states and left them without power for up to four hours. About 7m people also lost water service in Sao Paulo. All of Paraguay briefly lost power.
"There is an absolute failure of infrastructure in terms of energy," said Patrizia Tomasi, an engineer with the Brazilian energy consulting firm Planck E. "What we are seeing now is only the beginning. There is a need to invest more, to improve how energy is managed by those in the government. We have Itaipu, which is huge, which is great, but there are no lines to transmit all that energy."
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva disputed that the government has not done enough to improve the power grid since he took office in 2003, two years after Brazil suffered shortages and rationing under his predecessor.
"In seven years, we created 30 per cent of all the transmission lines built in the last 130 years," Silva said. "There was no shortage of power generation, and the problem was not a lack of transmission lines."
Lobao said Silva's government has invested about $13bn in transmission lines and $4.7bn more on transformers since 2003.
It was at least the fourth time since 1985 that Brazil has suffered a mammoth power outage blamed on transmission line failures from Itaipu.
The worst of the blackouts occurred in 1999 after lightning struck a power substation in Sao Paulo state, plunging 97m Brazilians into darkness for up to five hours.