Brazil Restores Power After Outage Hits Capital, Ten States

Power was restored in Brazil after an outage at a dam providing 20 percent of the country’s energy thrust about half of the nation’s 190 million people into darkness for at least two hours.

The 14,000-megawatt Itaipu Binacional hydroelectric dam said operations were back to normal at 6 a.m. local time after transmission failed, causing the world’s largest dam by output to forcibly shut down for the first time since it went online in 1983. The government is looking into what happened.

Authorities closed Rio de Janeiro’s international airport and the subway systems in Sao Paulo and Rio shut after the blackout struck around 10 p.m. local time, affecting 10 of the nation’s 26 states and the capital of Brasilia. The outage disrupted telephone services and caused car accidents. TV Globo reported random assaults by thieves on city streets in Rio.

“The problem was in transmission,” Jorge Samek, the Brazilian director of Itaipu, a company jointly operated with Paraguay, told TV Globo.

Trading at Sao Paulo-based BM&FBovespa SA, Latin America’s biggest exchange, won’t be affected by the power outage, Communications Director Alcides Ferreira said today.

While Brazil has seen power outages before, Energy Minister Edison Lobao told reporters in Brasilia that yesterday’s shouldn’t revive fears of the 2001 draught-induced energy crisis that forced the government to ration consumption and dampened economic growth.

CBS television newsmagazine “60 Minutes” reported three days ago that hackers may have been behind two previous blackouts in Brazil in 2005 and 2007. It isn’t clear who caused those outages or what their motive was, CBS said, citing U.S. intelligence officials it didn’t identify.

The southeastern port of Santos wasn’t affected because it was operating on its own generators, CBN Radio reported.

Near Rio’s iconic Ipanema beach, residents milling in the streets cheered when lights came back on around midnight local time after more than an hour in the darkness. Rio’s Governor Sergio Cabral deployed 300 military police to maintain calm in the city, which Lobao said was the most affected by the outage.

Lobao said storms may have played a role in causing the outage. He didn’t mention the possibility of a hacker attack.

Lobao said he will meet with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva today to begin seeking explanations for the power failure.

A spokeswoman for state-controlled utility Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras SA, who asked not to be named because of the company’s policy, declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News today. The company better known as Eletrobras is the sole distributor of Itaipu’s output in Brazil.

In July, Lula agreed to triple to about $360 million the amount it pays each year to Paraguay for the nearly 95 percent of the dam’s annual output it consumes, ending a dispute between the two countries over who benefits more.