The Economist, 02/10/2011
Graphic: The Economist
It was not a “blackout”, said Edison Lobão, merely a “temporary interruption of the electricity supply”. Brazil’s energy minister was speaking on February 4th after nearly 50m people across eight states in the country’s north-east had spent most of the night without power. Engineers are still investigating, but their preliminary conclusion is that a component in a substation failed just after midnight. That caused safety systems to malfunction, and transmission lines and then a power station to shut down.
Mr Lobão is trying to reserve the b-word for something more serious, which his government is determined to avoid: a big and sustained mismatch between electricity supply and demand. That last happened in 2001-02, after decades of growing energy use and low investment were followed by drought (70% of Brazil’s power comes from hydroelectric dams.) Back then, only rationing kept the lights on, and the after-effects dampened demand for some years.
Electricity use is growing strongly once more, rising by 7.8% last year. That is partly because Brazil’s economy is booming. But even if this changes, power use is unlikely to fall. Brazilians who have recently levered themselves out of poverty would give up much else before unplugging their first-ever fridges and washing machines. Luz Para Todos (Light for All), a government rural-electrification programme launched by Dilma Rousseff, the president, when she was energy minister, has hooked up more than 2.4m homes since 2003, and is continuing. The government reckons demand for electricity will rise by 5% a year over the next decade. Officials plan to mobilise investment totalling some 214 billion reais ($128 billion), from both private and public sources, in order to meet it.
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