The provincial Minister of Public Works, Gabriela Castillo, referred to the energy situation due to the power outages that occurred yesterday in Ushuaia, ensuring that “the extreme cold affected the distribution of gas and the operation of the equipment of the power plant”.
Along these lines, he explained that there were complications at the gas compressor station in the town of Tolhuin and, consequently, how it affected the electricity supply in the city of Ushuaia. In addition, he invited the community to make rational and responsible use of electricity and gas.
Regarding this, Castillo pointed out that “with this extreme cold there was a problem at the Tolhuin compressor station managed by Camuzzi” and that “from then on, a smaller amount of gas with lower pressure arrived to the city of Ushuaia and it did not cover the amount “What the plant needs at its entrance, at its plant, which has standards so that all the turbines can operate.”
“The extreme cold led to greater gas consumption and greater electricity consumption and these two combinations are really not good,” he added and reported that “this happened in the early hours of yesterday, they turned on, they didn’t turn on, they were cut off, and well, until they managed to turn all the equipment on, around 7 in the morning.”
In turn, he maintained that “everything he consumed during the night, without restrictions, meant that, in technical terms, we had to inflate the pipe and progressively increase the pressure.”
“Then,” he continued, “in the morning it started to lift, but we did not reach the standard it needed for it to work and for us not to have complications, because the other machines also generate consuming part of what enters the plant.”
In this context, the official specified that “before we have a problem and it stops and we go to a general blackout, what we did was remove a turbine from the line to reduce consumption and load.”
“That is why we first restrict towards the valleys and the industrial park, and after that we restrict the part of the rise of the hotels and towards the shopping side, being able to support all the rest of the city’s domicile, with which type 23: 00, the curve of the fall in consumption is already coming, because some of us are already going to sleep, so there we were able to restore the sectors that we had cut, only the substations of the industry companies remained, but the family homes in the sector of the industry were restored and this morning it was restored to a standard and we recovered the pressure that we normally have, so today the entire service is restored,” he said.
Finally, the Minister raised with the citizens “the rationality in the consumption of energy, energy and gas, what happened to us yesterday, is clearly a warning of situations that could even be repeated.”
