A Stupid, Stupid Consistency

Yet again Brazil pays a heavy price for the overreliance on hydroelectric power:

An important hydroelectric dam shared by Brazil and Paraguay failed Tuesday night, pushing a large swath of central and southern Brazil into darkness, said the country's minister of mines and energy, Edison Lobao.

At about 10:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m. ET), the Itaipu dam shut down completely, Lobao said in a radio interview.

Itaipu is the second largest hydroelectric facility in the world and the power lost was equivalent to losing all power in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most populous state. Yet Lula still is betting the house on more dams, including some in environmentally sensitive areas.

A severe drought in 1999 caused blackouts in Brazil. The way to avoid this in the future is to have a variety of energy sources, but no one seems that interested in Brazil; just sticking with the conventional sources. Expect more of this.

Comments

[Tambopaxi]

,,,We're going through 4-5 blackouts/day, by neighborhood, throughout the Sierra here in Ecuador for the same reason, over-reliance on hydro systems, plus failure by the government to plan/act on s setting up thermo and other supplemental power systems.

Correa's energy minister has hustled off to Peru and Colombia to buy power off the grid from them (we already do quite a bit of this with Colombia already) and Correa's doing rush purchase of thermo plants from Cuba, which relies mostly on these plants for its energy needs.

I don't about Brazil, but Correa and cia are taking a real political beating here over this, because it's clear (now) that the government saw these problems coming and did not adequately prepare for them; even worse, they gave the general public little or no heads up as to the situation. The first most of us knew that there was an energy crisis was when the lights went out; this does not set well with folks as you might imagine...

Finally, Randy, on separate note, in case you haven't seen it, there's another article on violence in Rio, this time over at latamthought.org. saludos