BUENOS AIRES, December 29. /TASS/. An electricity outage resultant from an overload on power grids in the wake of a heatwave affected more than 90,000 customers in Buenos Aires on Monday night, the data from Edesur and Edenor power utility companies said.
The load on the grids turned out to be too big after the air temperature in Buenos Aires climbed over 33 degrees Celsius and consumption of electricity reached 232,727.27 megawatts, slightly less than the record 24,034 megawatts that was registered on January 20, 2014.
Argentine power utilities can assure consumption of only 25,000 megawatts of electricity without electric power inflows from neighboring countries. As a result, Edesur and Edenor are compelled to resort to preventive outages of power supplies.
Energy and Mining Minister Juan Jose Aranguren declared earlier the introduction of an emergency situation in the field of electric power though to 2017 due to the warn-out state of national grids.
He indicated there were five outages per each customer in 2014, which meant the customers had to spend 33 hours on the average without electricity.
On Monday, the Argentine national meteorological service upgraded the level of risks caused by the heatwave to ‘orange’. Weather forecasters say the air temperatures will unlikely go down below 30 degrees Celsius for the next several days.