Chile power grid flickers back to life after huge outage and copper mines come back online

Chile’s power grid and major copper mines slowly came back online on Wednesday morning after a major outage hit the world’s top producer of the red metal, with power firms working to restore the system to full operation, authorities said.

The power outage, caused by a transmission line failure in northern Chile, struck mid-afternoon on Tuesday, plunging most of the South American country into darkness and knocking out electricity to major mines, buffeting global metal markets.

In an early morning report on Wednesday, Chile’s National Electricity Coordinator (CEN) said that more than 90% of residential consumption had been restored, though there were reports of intermittent power in some cities.

“Both the incident and its impact are a cause for worry,” Interior Minister Carolina Toha told a press conference, noting that a number of safety nets failed and other power stations failed repeatedly when trying to come back online.

The failure was attributed to energy distributor ISA Interchile, a subsidiary of Colombia’s ISA, which is owned by state oil company Ecopetrol.

A statement from ISA Interchile said it was still investigating the cause of the outage but added that electronic and software protection systems malfunctioned, disconnecting a high-voltage line and causing most of the grid to shut down.

“Interchile’s team is in constant coordination with the technical authority and will keep working tirelessly to proceed with the necessary investigations,” general manager Luis Llano said in the statement.

Toha said that an official state of emergency and curfew in place since 10 p.m. on Tuesday had been lifted. She said that about 220,000 users remained without power, mostly in the north, down from 8 million homes affected by the outage at its peak.

Major copper mines also started to come back online on Wednesday.

Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine, expects to return to regular operations in the next few hours, a source close to the matter told Reuters. Escondida is controlled by miner BHP.

Anglo American meanwhile said its Los Bronces and El Soldado mines, as well as its Chagres smelter in central Chile were restoring operations on Wednesday morning.

Chile’s Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, said that operations at all its divisions were gradually coming back online while Antofagasta said its operations had also resumed.

“All our divisions were affected by the power outage so contingency and backup plans were immediately activated,” Codelco said.

“The impact on our production plan is still under evaluation and its recovery will undoubtedly be a priority focus of the operating teams.”

Santiago’s subway service announced that it would resume services on most of its lines and stations.

(By Fabian Cambero and Alexander Villegas; Editing by Gabriel Araujo, Mark Heinrich, David Goodman and Daniel Wallis)