After the massive blackout that left millions of people across the country without electricity on Wednesday, former Energy Secretary Jorge Lapeña warned that “the system is wired” and asked the national government to provide an explanation.
“The system is tied up with a thread. It’s an anomalous system that works badly,” warned the president of the Argentine Institute for Energy, General Mosconi.
In this sense, he explained: «The Argentine generation system has 43,000 megawatts connected. However, experience shows that it cannot give more than 28,000 because there is a large number of plants that are counted as power plants that are out of order. And some for unexplained causes.
In this regard, he gave an example: “Some say they are stopped because they lack fuel. It’s ridiculous. Other plants are stopped because they are undergoing scheduled maintenance”.
And he complained: “How can it be that they are under maintenance at this time of greatest demand. It shouldn’t be like this. You have to schedule it when there is little load like in September. But if they schedule maintenance for January and February, they all have problems the days”.
“And there are other unexplained reasons, which is a large part of the park that is directly broken, without explanation,” he added, in a dialogue with Miter radio.
“So if you can only supply a load of 28,000 MW, we can say that it is an unreliable generation system which can cause problems. This is an abnormal system. It is tied with thread”, summarized.
Lapeña accused the government by asking for “explanations to clarify the situation”. In this regard, he explained that the massive power outage “requires expertise and a government commitment that has not yet been seen“.
“Demand was practically cut in half. Of the 26,500 MW that was required at the time, the system was down to 15. It took a long time to recover and when you look at all the regions of the country, they all had similar cuts. That is , it was a national cut,” he analysed.
This is why he asked the nation to do the same as former Energy Secretary Gustavo Lopetegui when in 2019 – in the midst of a massive Father’s Day blackout – “he immediately explained what happened to Congress and commissioned an expert report about how the protection system worked”.
“The situation requires official information from the government about what happened that we don’t know. We need to know if there have been human errors or not and if the protections have acted as they should according to the rules of good technique,” he said.
On this point, he added: “According to the expert report on the presence of human or technical errors in the performance of the system, to isolate the fault, they must apply penalties for those responsible because this cut has had an enormous cost from a human, social and economic point of view”. In this sense, he specified that “there were people who lost goods and were unable to work in the factories”.
The electricity blackout lasted four hours and touched – at different times – almost the whole country: from the north-east to Santa Cruz, passing through Córdoba, Mendoza, Santa Fe and Buenos Aires. In some neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, the light had not yet returned in the late morning of this Thursday.
The fire near a trunk line caused the outage of three lines that affected power plants, causing a domino effect.
“It is highly probable that the entire protection system was badly calibrated”, analyzed Lapeña. He said it was as if “instead of taking away the first car and isolating the question, the order had been reversed.”
“Macro explanations are not enough. It is not enough to say that Atucha I came out because it has 360 megawatts and 10 thousand have fallen. It’s kind of anecdotal. You have to do a black box type analysis of a crashing plane,” she explained.
Finally, he indicated that “in the event of a disturbance of this type, the system has protections which act in a thousand seconds which must isolate the fault as much as possible in the places where it occurred”.
“For this, the power plants are disconnected and some requests are dropped so that the system balances out. This has to happen in a thousand seconds. It’s a blink of an eye. The person doesn’t see it. So what happened that this didn’t happen and it spread across the country,” he said.
“Because the cuts were not only on the coast or in Cuyo, but they were produced from the north and from all over the country. Now a technical report needs to be done because it is a very sophisticated problem”, he concluded.
“The President is a Wrong Man”
Just before the massive power outage, Alberto Fernández gave an extensive speech at the opening of the regular sessions. He said to Congress that Argentina “is the energy the world needs.”
When asked about that sentence, Lapeña launched: “The president is a wrong man. He is not well advised and does not blush when he says things he shouldn’t. What happened yesterday seems to me a punishment from God. Because he finished saying it and there was the biggest blackout of the decade.”
“I have never found rationality in the things he says. He went to tell the king of Spain that Argentina is a reliable supplier of food and energy,” he exclaimed.
“He was going to tell her in the context of the war where Spain has to switch her supplies from Russia. But that’s absurd. I think the king must have qualified the person by that. It’s unreal. Thank goodness he didn’t say ‘Send me all the energy you can'”, he joked.
And he closed: “Argentina had an energy trade deficit in 2021 of 500 million dollars. In 2022, that value rose to $4.7 billion. Argentina is an importer and the President will tell the King that it is a reliable supplier. It seems to me that if we talk and focus on the president, I would say that what he says is not reliable.”
Source: Clarin
