The controller of the National Electricity Regulatory Entity (IN RE), Walter Martello, announced this Sunday that the agency will penalize the distributor Edesur due to the power outage in the middle of the New Year celebrations that “left thousands of users without power.”
“We are going to penalize the company. Although we know that it is not the solution, it is one of the tools available to the ENRE to fulfill our control function,” Martello said on his Twitter account.
For its part, Edesur reported through the same social network that the cut was a “high voltage failure” caused by “a pyrotechnic balloon” detected by company technicians and that “entered minutes after midnight in the inner courtyard of the Perito Moreno Substation.”
“This caused a short circuit that caused the protections to actleaving two high-voltage network transformers out of service,” explained Edesur, adding that once its teams were able to rebuild the affected area within the substation, “the service was normalized in stages.”
Beyond the position expressed by the company, Martello maintained that “there are no excuses for high temperatures” and warned that the role of the ENRE “is to demand explanations from the companies and they must demonstrate what the failure of this event has been, but Fundamentally, the priority is to resolve it as soon as possible”.
After citing reports from Edesur about an affectation to the service in various neighborhoods in the south of the City of Buenos Aires, the controller of the Ente reiterated the demand to act with “the maximum speed to recover the service.”
Once the inconvenience was overcome, Martello thanked “the ENRE staff who collaborated in the almost total resolution” and stressed that the role of the organization “is not to generate, transport or distribute energy” but “to control the service”, in addition to “be inflexible” before those responsible.
The cut affected about 400,000 usersaccording to unofficial estimates, although shortly after noon, 144 customers remained without service in the Edesur coverage area, 0.005% of the total, as reported by the ENRE on its website.
