The controller of the National Electricity Regulatory Agency (ENRE), Walter Martello, said that after the January 1 blackout that left more than 200,000 Edesur users without electricity the causes are under investigation which provoked him to determine whether there was liability of the company in which case”The necessary sanctions will be applied.
In dialogue with Télam Radio, Martello claimed that “the first day of this year there was a major blackout in the city of Buenos Aires, leaving more than 200,000 people without electricity at 0.21 hours”.
From Edesur they reported that the cause of the blackout was “a firework balloon who entered the internal courtyard of the Perito Moreno Substation a few minutes after midnight”, which “caused a short circuit which caused the activation of the protections” and put two high voltage network transformers out of order,
Martello assured that ENRE has taken “a series of decisions that have to do with the first one determine the causes beyond the company’s version” and he specified that “at this time” -during this morning- an ENRE team was “at the substation where the breakdown occurred”.
In this sense, he specified that they will quickly launch «everything that has to do with administrative acts a in the event that a situation has arisen which derives from the contractual obligations of the company and apply the necessary sanctions“.
Besides, he supported it “fines are not the only way” but he specified that it is a way to “protect users from the company’s lost investments, especially Edesur, which has accustomed us to this type of event”.
“In some cases (the power outages) they were justified by extremely high temperatures, but that was not the case” of what happened yesterday, in the early hours of 2023.
“We have been working since the event so that these situations do not repeat themselves and companies understand that they must treat us as users and not as customers based on their dominant and monopolistic market position”, concluded Martello.
Before Edesur explained the cause of the Martello’s power outage, he announced on his Twitter account that the regulatory body “It will penalize the company.”
“Edesur has left hundreds of thousands of users without electricity in the midst of the New Year’s celebrations,” Martello tweeted, and while acknowledging that the fine “is not the solution”, he indicated that “it is one of the tools available to the ENRE” to fulfill its “monitoring function”.
AQ
Source: Clarin
