Power supply back to normal in Brazil

The power supply has been restored to all regions of Brazil after a failure in a large transmission line the day before cut electricity to tens of millions of people, the Energy Ministry said on Thursday.

The power supply has been restored to all regions of Brazil after a failure in a large transmission line the day before cut electricity to tens of millions of people, the Energy Ministry said on Thursday.

Power distribution was back to normal in the North and Northeast regions, Energy Minister Fernando Coelho Filho told reporters. Those areas were hit hardest by Wednesday afternoon's failure that brought chaos to airports, subway systems, schools and traffic in some of the largest Brazilian cities, such as Recife, Salvador, and Belém.

The minister said he expected the results of an evaluation on the causes of the blackout to be released in 10 days.

The government wants to know why a malfunction in a transmission line linking the massive Belo Monte hydroelectric dam to the national grid caused the power supply failure, which affected half the country.

Belo Monte is located on the Xingu River in Pará state, but the glitch caused a domino effect on the system bringing down power distribution in at least 13 other states in the North and Northeast regions. There was also an impact, on a smaller scale, in some central states.

The consortium BMTE (Belo Monte Transmissora de Energia), formed by Brazil's state-controlled power company Eletrobras and China's State Grid Corp, acknowledged on Thursday there was a malfunction in its systems out of the Belo Monte dam.

It said the incident caused the interruption of power flow from the dam, Brazil's second-largest hydroelectric plant. BMTE said it fixed the issue in about 25 minutes.

It was not the first time that a localized failure caused a widespread blackout in Brazil.

In 2009, some 60 million people were without power for five hours after lightning hit one of the transmission lines conducting power from the Itaipu hydroelectric dam in southern Paraná state. 

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)