Ecuador suffered a nationwide blackout this Wednesday that left some 18 million people without electricity for more than half an hour.
The service, which affected practically the entire country, was restored by 95% late in the afternoon, confirmed the Minister of Public Works, Roberto Luque.
Luque, who also holds the acting Energy portfolio, attributed the power outage to the breakdown of a transmission line.
Quito’s metro system was paralyzed and the traffic lights stopped working in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday.
In addition to the capital, they were left without electricity supply Guayaquil, Cuenca and Mantaamong other cities.
A “cascading disconnection”
The authorities assured that the National Electricity Operator (Cenace) reported the fault and immediately began trying to resolve it.
“The immediate report that we received from Cenace is that there is a failure in the transmission line that caused a cascade disconnectionso there is no energy service on a national scale,” the minister published on the social network X.
Luque stated in another publication that “this event is a true reflection of the energy crisis we are experiencing, with lack of investment in generation (what happened in April), lack of investment in transmission (what happened today) and in distribution.”
“For years we have stopped investing in these systems and today we are experiencing the consequences,” he concluded.
For his part, the mayor of Quito, Pabel Muñoz, highlighted that the blackout must have been “very significant for even the energy in the Quito Metro, which uses an isolated system, to have been affected.”
The Quito Metro confirmed in a statement that services were interrupted “due to a widespread failure of the interconnected national electrical energy system.”
In April, a drought forced the government to announce a series of planned blackouts that left major cities without electricity for hours.
Most of the country’s electrical energy comes from neighboring Colombia.
The massive blackout comes just two days after the government ruled out the possibility of blackouts.
The Coca-Codo-Sinclair hydroelectric plant, Ecuador’s main power plant, was taken out of service on Monday to prevent it from suffering damage due to heavy rains.
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