Brazilian government calls on police to investigate massive power outage

Brazil’s government has tasked the Federal Police with investigating a blackout that left much of the country without power for several hours on Tuesday to determine if the reasons were simply “technical” or if it could have been provoked.

“I am formally authorizing the Department of Justice to issue a request to the federal police to conduct a police investigation so that they can investigate in detail what may have happened, in addition to diagnosing where it happened,” the minister said. Mining and Energy, Alexander Silveira, at a press conference in Brasilia.

Classifying the power outage as a “rare” event, the Brazilian minister stressed that he had asked for an 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 on power lines in the state of Ceara in the northeast of the country, one of the most affected regions.

However, he said that due to the reliability of the country’s transmission system, “just one event” would not be enough for a service interruption of the magnitude recorded on Tuesday, so they are trying to determine if there has been another outage.

The outage occurred at 8:31 a.m. (12:31 p.m. in Lisbon) and caused the separation of networks connecting the north and south of Brazil and service disruptions in 26 of the country’s 27 states.

The northern and northeastern regions most affected recovered six hours after the system failure, while the south and southeast regions lasted about 45 minutes, the minister said.

Although he had nothing to do with the blackout, Silveira criticized last year’s privatization of Eletrobras, a company responsible for a third of generation and about half of the country’s transmission lines.

“I would be flippant to point out that there is a direct reason for the privatization of Eletrobras. What I cannot but do is consistently, my position has always been and will not cease to be, that a strategic sector like this should 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 elections by current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who opposed the operation.

Silveira also added that while the Brazilian government owns a 43% stake in Eletrobras, it was not informed in advance of the resignation of company president Wilson Ferreira Jr. announced on Monday night, which he learned from the press.