Brazil Blackout Sparks Infrastructure Concerns

Brazilian authorities defended the reliability of the nation's electric grid after a massive power failure Tuesday darkened about half the country and revived concerns about Brazil's ability to provide energy infrastructure to match its surging economy.

Blackouts hit about 800 Brazilian cities, including Rio de Janeiro and the economic hub of São Paulo, around 10 p.m. Tuesday night after three high-power transmission lines collapsed, triggering a domino effect that prompted a 14,000-megawatt hydroelectric plant to go offline, officials said. Paraguay, which shares the dam with Brazil, also suffered a major blackout.

Energy Minister Edison Lobão said the outage was provoked by an intense concentration of lightning, wind and rain. He called it a chance occurrence that even the best-designed systems wouldn't prevent.

Brazil has invested tens of billions of dollars to upgrade its energy generation and transmission capacity in recent years. Safeguards should limit disruption from storms.

"There was obviously some failure, either technical or human," said José Soares, Moody's Investors Service. "The problem is the magnitude, and they should provide a clear answer as to why this won't happen in the future."

Determined to avoid a repeat, Brazil has spent or drawn $47 billion of investment in new plants and transmission systems. It has plans to build four nuclear reactors, and it wants big dams deep in the Amazon forest.

While the investment has helped quiet questions about Brazil's energy supply, this week's blackout has raised new ones about how well the system is working. Maintenance problems contributed to a major 2007 outage in Espírito Santo state. Adriano Pires, who directs the Brazilian Center for Infrastructure Studies, declared that transmission-line maintenance isn't up to standard on a range of news programs.

This is what awaits us with the Obama’s Tax and Trade program. NO new coal plants will be licenced, NO new nuclear plants will be licensed (none have been licensed since 1979 thanks to political maneuvering), NO new hydro plants will be licensed because of environmental policy, NO new natural gas powered plants will be licensed because CO2 is now a pollutant. There you have the 4 largest suppliers of electric power that under the present administration can not build new plants.

The form on generation the President touts as new clean generation (solar and wind) presently produce less than 2 percent of the electricity in the US. If their share of the generation were to triple in the next decade it would still account for less than 10% of the total US generation.

The US nuclear power fleet is aging. The first generation of nuclear power plants is slowly being retired. With no new power plants being built to replace them their share of power generation is falling. However the hunger of the US population for electricity is increasing. It does not take much thought to foresee what will happen to an aging electric grid when demand outstrips supply. One hot summer day in the not to distant future either the grid will fail or rolling blackouts will become the norm and people will die because politicians could not make the hard choices and clear the way for new generation to be built.

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