MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A cold snap cut off the power of 4.7 million users in northern Mexico early Monday morning, triggering a rush by authorities to restore service and bring in extra fuel, with parts of neighbors United States also affected.
Frozen pipelines and a tightening of Texas natural gas deliveries affected several northern states, although at noon the service was restored to 58% of the affected supply, said Mexican national electricity operator CENACE.
The outage reached about 6,950 megawatts of cargo, CENACE said, urging people in the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Nuevo Leon, Sinaloa, Sonora and Tamaulipas to reduce energy use.
The freeze also cut electricity for more than 2 million customers in Texas.
Guillermo Nevarez, a senior executive at Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE), said that 4.7 million users were initially affected by the outage and, at around noon, the service was restored to nearly 2.6 million of them.
The CFE promised to use energy from other sources to help cover deficiencies and said that the recent spike in natural gas prices caused by the crisis would add 20 billion pesos to its costs. But users’ electricity tariffs are unlikely to be affected, he said.
To help make up for the natural gas deficit in the United States, two shipments will arrive at the ports of Manzanillo and Altamira in the next few days, said Miguel Reyes, another senior CFE executive, speaking at a virtual news conference with Nevarez.
Previously, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rejected suggestions that the interruption could be linked to a “boycott” by private power generators upset about his plan to strengthen the CFE.
An energy nationalist, Lopez Obrador wants to strengthen state control of the industry, arguing that previous governments have distorted the energy market in favor of the private sector.
In late December, an outage in Mexico left 10.3 million users without power for up to two hours.
(Reporting by Sharay Angulo; Writing by Dave Graham; Editing by Richard Chang and Sonya Hepinstall)