Between explosions, fires and shortages of natural gas: these are the causes of power outages, according to the AMLO government

This Monday, February 15, a mega blackout was recorded in northern Mexico, with the cities of Monterrey and Juárez being the main cities affected, where the electricity supply service will continue to be compromised by various factors; However, critics of the administration Andrés Manuel López Obrador have already pointed out that this is not the first time that failures have appeared in the sector.

The problems of supply and distribution of electric energy in charge of Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) have manifested themselves in different episodes over the two years and two months of the current government.

Having different types of causes, the failures that gave rise to the blackouts can be counted in particular from November of last year to this Monday. Yes its consequences have had a negative impact on more than 14 million users.

The first incident in the supply of electricity in the fourth quarter took place in the Benito Juárez de la Mexico, when he Sunday November 29, 2020 a fire in a electricity production station recorded an explosion and fire that left the inhabitants of this demarcation and part of Coyoacán without electricity.

The assignment was located in the colony Xoco, near Cineteca Nacional, at approximately 6:40 p.m. PST. To attend to the emergency, Claudia Sheinbaum’s government evacuated 250 inhabitants, closed the station of Public transport system (STC) Coyoacán Metro of line 3 and had specialized personnel to deal with the incident.

“Regarding the fire in the mayor’s office, B. Juárez reported that he was in a transmission substation of the Federal Electricity Commission. On site, firefighters, civil protection, SSC and CFE personnel. Residents of the surrounding area were expelled for reasons of prevention “, published the head of government on his official Twitter account.

It was later reported that the fire had shown no injuries or deaths; however 32,000 users were left without service due to this failure.

Another power failure who stole the media lens was the one that was featured on Monday December 28, 2020, when the overload on a transmission line between the city of Linares and Ciudad Victoria triggered a temporary suspension of electricity service that affected more than 10 million users.

In this regard, the office of the commission carried out an expertise in which it established a unique version in which the causes of the shortage of the electricity network were established.

The first expert to explain what happened was engineer Noé Peña Silva, CFE transmission manager, who explained that the failure was caused by a fire in the municipality of Padilla, Tamaulipas, which affected one of the two transmission lines between Linares and Ciudad Victoria, overloaded, leaving one inoperative and the other overloaded.

First, to support this version, a document was presented allegedly issued by the Secretariat of Civil Protection of Tamaulipas, which testified that a pasture had caught fire; However, the Tamaulipas government subsequently ensured that the leaf shown as evidence of the fire was apocryphal.

Finally, there is the blackout on Monday, which affected 4.7 million users only in the north of the country. According to National Energy Control Center (Prices) occurred by “A high flow of electrical energy between the southern and northern regions of the country, caused by the production of power plants due to the lack of natural gas and the loss of certain elements of the national transmission network”.

In addition, the federal government pointed out that this was due to a gradual weakening of the CFE’s infrastructure in this region, which favored electricity providers based in the United States; however, due to meteorological events which acted against the facilities, the supply in Mexico was affected.

When this blackout occurred, and given this explanation, the Q4 government reaffirmed the need to achieve energy self-sufficiency.

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