The Federal electricity commission (CFE) admitted this Tuesday that the document of Tamaulipas Civil Protection about the fire that caused last week’s blackout was false.
In a press conference, the state electricity company explained that the Tamaulipas Civil Protection document that it presented on December 28 was false, although it detailed that the fire that supposedly put two power transmission lines at risk did occur in grasslands of the entity.
The company directors explained in a conference that last Saturday there were three other fires in the area, which did not cause interruptions in the energy supply, Therefore, they argued that the failures of the system were due to excess renewable generation in the country that the current government will continue to limit within the framework of its powers.
Noé Peña Silva, General Director of Transmission of the CFE, assured that the state electricity company has already drawn up a record of events with all the personnel involved in the publication of the false bulletin of the Tamaulipas Civil Protection, in which it was reported that a fire caused the departure of two transmission lines in the entity and that due to the generation imbalance caused interruptions of up to four hours in the power supply of 10.3 million users in 15 entities.
Read also: Tamaulipas denounces the CFE for apocryphal documents
Carlos Andrés Mar, Director of Operations, explained that the fire was mitigated without the participation of Civil protection, with control activities only by CFE personnel, but there is the hypothesis that the ionization of the soil emits a heat bubble that sends an alert signal to the network switches, which automatically turn them off.
So, by reconnecting the energy in an area where 2,500 megawatts of renewable energy have been operating at the same time –as is Tamaulipas – there is less availability of these renewables, so 9,262 megawatts went out of operation, of which 6 1,671 megawatts were CFE’s combined cycle and conventional plants, and 1,714 photovoltaic megawatts in addition to 877 megawatts of wind power.
Of these, a total of 4 thousand 84 megawatts are independent energy producers that are privately hired by CFE, which went out of operation in the north of the country, being replaced by geothermal and hydroelectric plants from the Bajío and Centro.
CFE took advantage of this argument to blame in part the generation of renewable energy.
Read also: Cenace will lower switch to part of intermittent renewable energy to prevent blackouts; private will be affected
According to the CFE general director, Manuel Bartlett, the problem is not an apocryphal document that is already being investigated “but the excess of permits granted in the past administration for more than 21 thousand renewable megawatts that will be installed in the same nodes or geographical areas, generating more and more this type of imbalance. Hence, the government will maintain its position of stopping the connection of renewable energy, which saturates the transmission system “.
In this way, the official responded to the Business Coordinating Council and assured that his interest in investing in networks is due to the nature of private businesses, which seek to dispatch all the energy they install with subsidized support from the CFE and without paying for the transmission networks What do they use.
“We are not at the moment of being able to make transmission lines dedicated to that intermittent energy,” Carlos Morales Mar finally asserted.
In fact, CFE argued that the National Energy Control Center (Cenace) will be forced to take part of the intermittent renewable generation out of operation to ensure the reliability of the national system.
Read also: Due to blackout, PAN demands independent investigation and immediate removal of Bartlett from CFE
Luis Bravo, CFE communication director, had already stated that “as a preventive measure in low demands, Cenace will be forced to take part of the intermittent renewable generation out of operation to ensure the reliability of the national system.”
He said that in the near future the intermittent generation capacity authorized by the CRE will be doubled (21 thousand Megawatts) and the risk of reliability of the national system will increase to demands of low energies.
“The national system cannot operate with excess intermittent generation and Cenace is obliged by law to limit the maximum capacity to be generated at each node to ensure reliability. This will imply for private generators to reduce their annual production ”, he stated.
pipe / acmr