CAN BRAZIL IMMUNE 2016 OLYMPICS FROM BLACKOUT DISASTER ?
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – Organizers of the 2016 Olympics are pitching host city Rio de Janeiro as a potential "power island" immune from blackouts like the one that left 60 million Brazilians in the dark, though experts questioned Thursday whether a safe energy haven for the games is possible.
Source: AP
- Rio has the capacity to produce more energy than it can consume with natural gas-fired plants and nuclear energy facilities nearby. And Brazil's Olympic Committee touted that fact in its bid proposal, saying locally generated energy could supply the city alone instead of being fed into the national grid.
- The Olympic venues themselves will also be supported with power from new wind and solar power projects.
- But since late Tuesday's blackout, which darkened all of Rio and much of Brazil, the committee has refused to comment on the outage or the power island concept.
- Instead, committee officials e-mailed to reporters the section of the bid proposal on energy that does not provide detailed information on what's needed to isolate Rio with its own electricity. Brazil's Energy Ministry also declined to comment Thursday.
- Experts said the idea of removing Rio from the national grid so it alone would use its energy is feasible, but questioned why bid officials provided no details of their planned infrastructure investments in the proposal.
- The Olympic report calls Brazil's electrical system "highly successful and structured." But red flags were raised by storms that apparently short-circuited transformers on a key transmission line from the Itaipu dam that funnels 20 percent of Brazil's electricity, said Johanna Mendelson Forman, an energy expert with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
WIDESPREAD BLACKOUT DARKENS BRAZIL AND PARAGUAY
RIO DE JANEIRO – Brazil emerged early Wednesday from a widespread power outage that plunged its major cities into darkness for hours, prompting concern from residents about another black eye for a country hosting the 2016 Olympic Games.
Source: AP
- Power went out for more than two hours late Tuesday in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and several other major cities, affecting millions of people, after transmission problems knocked one of the world's biggest hydroelectric dams offline. Airport operations were hindered and subways ground to a halt.
- All of neighboring Paraguay was plunged into the dark, but for less than a half hour.
- Lights twinkled back on along Rio's famed Copacabana beach, in South America's largest city of Sao Paulo and in Paraguay's sleepy capital of Asuncion, but questions remained about what happened and what the fallout would be in Brazil, a nation seen as an ascending economic and political power in the region.
- "The image of Brazil, of Rio, is bad enough with all the violence," said 35-year-old graphic designer Paulo Viera, as he sat in a restaurant a block from the sandy arc of Copacabana.
- Drinking quickly warming beer, he said he worried about how the outage might look for a city that last month was picked to host the 2016 Olympics and will be the showcase city for soccer's World Cup in 2014. "We don't need this to happen. I don't know how it could get worse."
- The blackout comes on the heels of a wave of gang fighting in Rio's favelas that led to violence fears for the Olympics.
- "It's sad to see such a beautiful city with such a precarious infrastructure," said 22-year-old law student Igor Fernandes. "This shouldn't happen in a city that is going to host the Olympic Games."
- The outage occurred when the huge Itaipu dam straddling the two nations' border stopped producing 17,000 megawatts of power, Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao said. He said outages hit nine of the 27 states in this country of more than 190 million people. No power outages happened in Brasilia, the national capital.
- The cause of the failure had not been determined, but Lobao said strong storms uprooted trees near the Itaipu dam just before it went offline and could be to blame.
- Lobao said the hydro plant at the dam itself was working, but there were problems with the power lines that carry electricity across Brazil. Brazil uses almost all the energy produced by the dam, and Paraguay consumes the rest.
- In Paraguay, the national energy agency blamed the blackout on a short-circuit at an electrical station near Sao Paulo, saying that failure shut down the entire power grid supplied by Itaipu. All of Paraguay went dark for about 20 minutes, the country's leading newspaper, ABC Color, reported.
- The agency in charge of the dam, Itaipu Binacional, said the blackout did not start at the hydroelectric complex. It said the most likely cause was a failure at one or more points in the transmission system.
- The blackouts came two days after CBS's "60 Minutes" news program reported that several past Brazilian power outages were caused by computer hackers. Brazilian officials had played down the report before the latest outages, and Lobao did not mention it.
- Brazil's official Agencia Brasil news agency said Tuesday's outage started about 10:20 p.m. (1220 GMT), snarling streets in Rio, where traffic that is normally chaotic turned riotous.
- Cars, taxis and buses sped through dark intersections, honking to make their presence known as they zoomed through. Pedestrians scampered across avenues, and tourists scurried back to a handful of luxury beach hotels, the only buildings with light.
- The Itaipu dam is the world's second biggest hydroelectric producer, supplying 20 percent of Brazil's electricity. China's Three Gorges dam is the largest.
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