Everyone living in mainland Chile between Arica and Puerto Montt was affected by yesterday’s major electrical blackout.
It was due to simultaneous failures in both sections of a double transmission line in the Norte Chico, which at the time was feeding 2GW southwards. Its probably no coincidence that this event occurred at a period of peak demand in Santiago, (3 pm on a hot summer workday.)
The remaining generators online at the time didn’t have the capacity to compensate for this abrupt loss of power, and automatically shut themselves down in cascade to prevent overloading and damage.
Re-establishing power takes time as each generating station has go through a startup process before reconnection, first locally, then carefully synchronized with the national grid. This process can’t be rushed, and can take several hours, especially where grid interruption may have caused secondary failures.
As is usual here, communications was the first casualty due to the limited standby battery capacity of most Cellular base stations. Here in the Coquimbo region, most FM radio stations also went off-air, one notable exception being Radio BioBio’s local transmission.
We took some basic precautions such as storing water and dropping our main circuit breakers to avoid equipment damage if power isn’t cleanly restored.
This morning we woke to find that our power was back on, as seems to be the case in most of the country.
!