Edenor outage cuts power to over 1.5 million people

A massive blackout originating in Edenor's grid cut electricity to roughly 600,000 users on Saturday night, September 19, affecting more than 1.5 million people across northern Buenos Aires and parts of the metropolitan suburbs. Edenor stated that it still does not know the precise causes of the failure, which also dragged down Edesur's Santa Rita substation and left almost 80,000 of Edesur's users without power.

The incident caused Edenor to lose approximately 11% of its electricity demand, according to sources from grid operator Sacme. Regulators and sector sources reported that the disruption began with a switch failure at Edenor's Malaver substation in the San Martín district, which was out of service for maintenance and forced surrounding circuit breakers to trip.

The blackout began around 8:30 p.m., leaving street lights, traffic signals, and cultural venues in darkness across neighborhoods including Palermo, Recoleta, Belgrano, and Villa Urquiza, as well as suburban areas such as Vicente López and San Isidro. While Edenor initially logged only 649 affected customers on the Enrege regulatory tracking site near 9:00 p.m., it later acknowledged 519,474 interrupted users just before 10:00 p.m., before quickly reducing that figure to 24,094.

Technicians worked to energize a 220-kilovolt high-voltage line operated by Edenor to stabilize the grid. By 9:30 p.m., Edesur had normalized its affected service, and after 10:00 p.m., the majority of Edenor's customers were recovering power as crews completed local network repairs.