Ecuador is left without electricity after failure in the transmission system

A failure in the energy transmission system that occurred this Wednesday afternoon in Ecuador has left almost the entire country without electricity, according to the acting Minister of Energy, Roberto Luque.

The Secretary of State indicated in his X network account that the National Electricity Operator (Cenace) reported the failure and that every effort is being made to try to recover the electrical service as soon as possible.

“The immediate report that what we received from Cenace is that there is a failure in the transmission line which caused a cascading disconnection, so there is no energy service on a national scale,” the minister wrote in a brief message.

“We are concentrating all our efforts on solving the problem as quickly as possible,” he added.

For its part, a source close to the electricity operators told EFE that Cenace has offered to provide a response to the sudden massive power outage in the next few minutes.

According to information media on the internet, The “massive blackout” has affected several regions of the country and the lack of electrical service has been confirmed in cities such as Quito, Guayaquil, Cuenca and Manta, among others.

The surprising massive power outage occurred two days after the Government ruled out the possibility of blackouts, as had been announced on Monday, after the Coca-Codo-Sinclair hydroelectric plant, the most important generator in the country, went out of operation.

The system’s withdrawal of that plant was due to the danger that it could suffer damage due to the increase in the amount of sediment in the flows of the rivers that feed it, due to the intense rains.

Minister Luque then assured that in principle the problems of sedimentation accumulation had caused the plant to stop operating, but he said that a so-called “compensating reservoir” had been used to get it back into operation.

In addition, the minister had warned that there was a similar danger in the Agoyán and San Francisco hydroelectric plants, also due to the effects of the intense rains, which is why the country had stopped generating 2,145 megawatts of energy. AND