(Photo Archive ICE Workers)

The Costa Rica Electricity Institute (ICE) explained through a press release that the blackout which affected the country yesterday was caused by a failure of the Panamanian transmission system.

The reestablishment of the service was done gradually to avoid a collapse of the system; even though Nicaragua, Panama and the rest of the Central American countries were affected, their systems were only partially interrupted.
Costa Rica is part of a regional interconnected system of 1,820 kilometers of transmission lines. The production systems the country has allows its isolation in different events that affect other countries frequently, however, yesterday’s failure was caused by the outage of 500 megawatts (40 %) in the system , an output so significant that the protection system was not able to handle it.

The interconnected system allows the exchange of energy among the countries and in the case of Costa Rica it allows the export of electricity at moments when the country has a surplus.

It is estimated that yesterday’s blackout affected close to 1.4 million ICE clients. There is still not an estimated amount of the economic loss this service interruption could have represented, however, in April this year Luis Pacheco, Electricity Manager of ICE had mentioned in a press release (in which ICE celebrated 10 years of not suffering a national blackout), ¨We estimate that just one total blackout of the National Electric System, that would require close to three hours to reestablish the service, would generate losses of ₡8.400 million colones (almost $15 million USD)¨,

Many areas lost power from 1:15 p.m. and almost through 7 p.m.; a lot of businesses had to close doors. The fact that this blackout took place during a weekend when many businesses don’t operate could have helped bring down the financial loss.

The biggest inconveniences were caused at the Juan Santamaría Airport which had to interrupt its normal operation temporarily causing several flight delays and suspensions. There were also several traffic accidents caused by non-functioning traffic-lights, (some traffic lights continued to work normal because they are solar powered).

The last national blackout the country suffered was back in August 21, 2001; in 2007 there was a failure that affected several areas of the country for almost one hour.