The Brazilian government has instructed federal police to investigate the blackout that left much of the country without electricity for several hours on Tuesday, to determine whether the causes were purely “technical” or if it could have been provoked.
“I am making it official for the Justice Department to forward a request to the Federal Police to conduct a police investigation so that they can investigate in detail what might have happened, in addition to diagnosing exactly where it happened. happened,” the minister said. of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira, at a press conference in Brasilia.
The Brazilian minister classified the blackout as a “rare” event and stressed that he had asked for the investigation because of the “sensitivity of the national electricity sector”, which does not allow “its safety” to be neglected.
However, he clarified that an “overload” was detected in transmission lines in the state of Ceará, in the northeast of the country, one of the hardest hit regions.
However, he said that due to the robustness of the country’s transmission system, for a service outage of the magnitude recorded, “just one event” would not be enough, so they are trying to determine if there was another outage.
The blackout occurred at 8:31 a.m. (12:31 p.m. in Lisbon) on Tuesday and caused a separation of the networks connecting the north and south of Brazil and service interruptions in 26 of the country’s 27 states.
The most affected regions in the north and northeast recovered six hours after the system crash, while in the south and southeast the outage lasted about 45 minutes, the minister said.
While unrelated to the blackout, Silveira last year criticized the privatization of Eletrobras, responsible for a third of production and owner of about half of the country’s transmission lines.
“I would be frivolous if I pointed out that there is a direct cause associated with the privatization of Eletrobras. What I cannot fail to do is to be consistent, my position has always been this and will not cease to be, is that a strategic sector like this must have the firm hand of the Brazilian state,” he said.
Eletrobras was privatized in 2022 by the government of then-President Jair Bolsonaro, who was defeated in the polls by the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who opposed the operation.
Silveira also added that while the Brazilian government owns 43% of Eletrobras’ shares, it was not informed in advance of the resignation of the company’s president, Wilson Ferreira Junior, which was announced on Monday night and about which he heard in the press.
Source: DN
