The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) reported yesterday, June 22, that between 8:32 and 8:40 a.m. six high-voltage lines went out of operation, affecting 1.3 million users in the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan, which represent 62% of the total users of that region.
At 2:00 p.m., the state-owned electricity company fully reestablished the service, assuring that on this occasion the effects occurred after a failure derived from an accident involving a state-owned worker who remains hospitalized.
According to the company, the employee provided maintenance – a task that is constantly carried out – in the main node (substation) of the peninsula, which provides service to the hotel zone of Cancun and the Riviera Maya.
“When the equipment and the transmission line are damaged, the others go out of operation for protection, so as not to cause further damage,” the company explained.
In January of last year, six minutes of ground heating caused by an outbreak of fire located in Tamaulipas were enough for the disconnection of two lines to stop transmitting the equivalent of 12% of the electrical generation capacity in the country, leaving a quarter of CFE’s customers without electricity.
Then, two transmission lines between Nuevo León and Tamaulipas went out of operation: Güemez and Lajas, which with a combined length of 575 kilometers, barely 2.4% of the total length of lines with a capacity of 400 kilovolts, prevented four renewable plants and two of combined cycle dispatched around 9,296 megawatts for six minutes, which generated an imbalance in the system that caused not only in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, but in 15 entities, which included the Valley of Mexico.
deficit in the north
And then, on February 15, 2021, between 6:19 a.m. and 6:32 a.m., the Automatic Load Trigger (supply interruption) operated, due to a generation deficit in the north and northeast of the country, leaving 4.8 million users without supply. , in the states of Nuevo León, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, Zacatecas and Durango.
The purchase of gas that increased from 5 to 200 dollars per thousand BTU in hours and the arrival of liquefied natural gas ships, all product of the low temperatures that forced the closing of operations in exporting plants and pipelines in Texas, caused a net loss of 35,606 million pesos in the first quarter of the year for the CFE.
In addition, in July 2021, the storm that was experienced in Sonora east left 3.5% of CFE clients without electricity, which due to natural phenomena has worked at forced marches since December 2020 and not from the season of hurricanes as occurred in previous years for decades, reporting incidents in at least half of the country’s states in 2021. On that occasion, a total of 40,590 users were affected.