SEC fines utilities US$7.3mn for 2002 power cut

Chile's energy regulator SEC has fined 12 generators and transmission companies a total of US$7.3mn for their responsibility in a blackout that cut power to about 10 million people in central Chile on September 23, 2002, the SEC said in a statement Tuesday. "The generation and transmission companies failed to comply with their legal obligation adequately to coordinate the system's operation to ensure the safety of electrical service by not carrying out the necessary checks and verifications to operate and maintain the system correctly," the statement said. The outage was caused by inadequate operation of the system, and not from a lack of transmission or generation capacity, SEC superintendent Sergio Espejo said. "Systems that are 100% secure don't exist, therefore the capacity to isolate outages so that they don't spread through the system and later to guarantee fast recovery of service is as important as preventing them from happening," said Espejo. "That's precisely what didn't happen." SEC determined that transmission company HQI Transelec and generator Colbun bore the brunt of the responsibility for the outage. Transelec was fined US$1.27mn for faulty programming in the protection of its power lines, which meant a failure at one of its stations had knock-on effects throughout the system. Colbun was fined US$1.01mn because once the Transelec line went down, the SIC couldn't quickly re-establish power because a Colbun turbine wasn't prepared to deliver emergency power as required under a contingency plan. Transelec is owned by Canada's HydroQuebec and is the main transmission company in the SIC grid that delivers power to most of central Chile, while Colbun is owned by Belgium's Tractebel. Generators Endesa Chile and AES Gener, amongst other companies, were also fined US$760,000 each for failing adequately to maintain the emergency system and for not supplying SEC with information necessary to proceed with the investigation, the SEC said. "We are going to determine the steps to take once we have been formally notified and we have studied the text in depth," a source at AES Gener told BNamericas.