Power blackout hits Chile, halts copper mines

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1 of 3. A woman listens to news on the radio during a blackout in Vina del Mar city, about 121 km (75 miles) northwest of Santiago September 24, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Eliseo Fernandez

By Moises Avila and Simon Gardner

SANTIAGO | Sat Sep 24, 2011 11:04pm EDT

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - A massive power blackout paralyzed crucial copper mines in Chile on Saturday and darkened vast swaths of the country including the capital Santiago before energy was largely restored, officials said.

The outage acutely exposed the fragility of the energy grid in the world's top copper producer, which was devastated by a powerful earthquake in 2010.

Critics have blamed Chilean President Sebastian Pinera for under-investment in infrastructure and his popularity ratings have dropped since taking office last year. Prior to the power failure, he was already struggling with massive protests by university students demanding deep educational reforms.

Scrambling engineers were able to fully restore power generation and get distribution up to 90 percent of normal, the government said after the blackout, which lasted a couple of hours in most places.

"We've regained power in various regions of the country," said Chilean Energy Minister Rodrigo Alvarez.

At an earlier briefing, Alvarez said the cause of the outage was unknown but that computers that help run the energy grid had also malfunctioned. The blackout primarily hit the center of the country, where nearly 10 million of Chile's 16 million people live.

Initially, Angloamerican said its Los Bronces mine was halted and state-run Codelco said its Andina division and El Teniente mine were also paralyzed.

But Codelco later said power had been restored at the Andina division and El Teniente. It said output was not hurt at Andina as generators were used.

Meanwhile, Los Bronces said it was relying on generators and production was at a third of capacity as normal energy supplies had yet to come on line.

Authorities said the Collahuasi and Chuquicamata mines in the far north of Chile were not affected and that the blackout did not extend that far.

(Additional reporting by Antonio Delajara and Alexandra Ulmer; Writing by Terry Wade; Editing by Todd Eastham)

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California Blackout a reminder of vulnerability of U.S. power grid

SAN DIEGO - Power has been restored to millions of people in the southwest of the United States and the Mexico after a massive power outage, but questions remain about how such a huge failure could have been caused by a single utility worker doing work for minor repairs.

Failure of Thursday has intrigued experts and authorities and recalled that the U.S. transmission lines remain vulnerable to cascading blackouts.

Several similar failures have been in recent years. In 2003, a power outage has knocked unconscious power to 50 million people in the Midwest and Northeast. And, in 2005, a major failure struck the metropolitan area of Los Angeles.

The same year, Congress required utilities to comply with the standards of Federal reliability for the electrical network, instead of self-regulation. Layers of guarantees and safeguards were intended to isolate problems and make sure that power keeps flowing.

But this is not to arrive Thursday.

"There are a lot of critical pieces of equipment on the system and we have less defense that we believe, said Rich Sedano at the regulatory Assistance project, a utility industry think tank based in Montpellier, Vermont."

The worker of Arizona Public Service Co. switching out a capacitor, which controls levels of tension, outside of Yuma, Arizona, near the border of California. Shortly after, a section of a line of regional power has failed, possibly disorder spread rained down in California and the Mexico later, officials said.

And the lights have started out in the border region of approximately 6 million people.

The blackout has eliminated traffic lights, causing traffic jams on the roads in the area of San Diego. Two reactors at a nuclear power plant to the coast of California went offline after losing power. More than 2 million gallons of wastewater discharged into the water off the coast of San Diego, the eighth largest U.S. city of closing beaches.

The National University System Institute for Policy Research, believes the interruption of the San Diego-area economy over $ 100 million.

Many had to spend the night, both sides of the border in the United States and Mexico, difficulty falling asleep in high temperatures.

Federal investigators and States are trying to determine what caused the failure and how it is possible to prevent future problems. If regulatory violations are discovered, the Government could issue fines of up to 1 million per day for each offence, said officials.

Among the questions they ask are the reason for which guarantees to keep the power flowing appeared to work, at least at first. There is a gap of about 10 minutes between the time when the power line failed and customers lost electricity, said Daniel Froetscher, vice president of the Phoenix-based APS energy delivery.

The line was "solid, reliable" without a history of problems, said Froetscher.

San Diego Gas & Electric Co. should have isolated the problem by arresting the Powerlink southwest of 500 kV as it did in 2007 forest fires, said Michael Shames, Executive Director of the advocacy group, utility Consumers' Action Network.

"If a fire occurs in the kitchen, the first thing you do is close the door to the kitchen to stop it from spreading,", he said.

He also questioned why the San Onofre nuclear plant was forced to close, and why the other backup energy did not kick in.

Of Michael Niggli, SDG & E President and Chief Executive Officer, said that the company did not have the time to close the line because it had no warning.

Said Niggli automatic circuit breakers to San Onofre prevent the power failure spread to Southern California Edison, which serves 14 million people in the Los Angeles area.

At a Friday press conference, Niggli compared the grid to a peaceful pond. "When someone throws a rock here, it causes ripples. According to what rock has, these wrinkles are touching everyone who is in the pond, "he says.

Experts believe that the problem could have been worse by the manner in which the flow of power in California.
California imports of huge amounts of power from Arizona and other States. When variations in voltage caused the San Onofre nuclear power plant to shut down to protect themselves, it deprives the grid of a huge source of energy generated in California.

Normally, this power loss would result more from Arizona.

But this power was already offline, depriving the area of power.

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