The blackout on Tuesday night left tens of millions of people without power across most of the country's wealthy southeastern region, halting subways and snarling traffic in major cities.
Brazil's president sought an urgent explanation on Wednesday for the worst power outage in a decade, which left a huge swath of the country in the dark for more than five hours and raised doubts about the reliability of its energy infrastructure.
The blackout on Tuesday night left tens of millions of people without power across most of the country's wealthy southeastern region, halting subways and snarling traffic in major cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The cause of the outage was unclear.
Energy officials said the giant Itaipu hydroelectric dam had shut down, but the Itaipu Binacional company that runs the project said in a statement on Wednesday that problem originated elsewhere.
It said the dam on the border between Brazil and Paraguay had been functioning normally but had not been able to transmit energy because power lines were not working properly. "We haven't established the cause of the problem yet," energy minister Edison Lobao told the O Globo news network.
Lobao earlier told reporters that a storm may have caused power lines from Itaipu to shut down, causing a chain reaction that cut service throughout Brazil and Paraguay, which gets about 90 percent of its electricity from the dam.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva summoned Lobao for an urgent meeting in the capital Brasilia early on Wednesday to explain what caused the outage. The massive power failure was already being politicised on morning talk shows throughout Brazil, with opposition politicians accusing the government of negligence in maintaining the country''s transmission lines.
The blackout affected 10 of Brazil's 26 states, including the capital Brasilia, and left all of Paraguay in the dark for about 15 minutes. The last time Brazil suffered an outage on such a large scale was 1999, when a lightening bolt struck a transmission line in Sao Paulo state. Two years later, the government was forced to implement energy rationing after a severe drought.
Power was fully restored in Sao Paulo, Brazil's financial capital and South America's largest city, before dawn on Wednesday. The Itaipu power plant provides about 20 percent of the electricity supply in Brazil, Latin America''s largest economy, but more than 90 percent of Paraguay's.
Traffic on the streets of Sao Paulo descended into chaos shortly after the power outage. Thousands of passengers were forced to exit stalled subway trains and walk along the tracks to get back to stations and make their way to the surface. The city's streets were still clogged early on Wednesday after the mayor cancelled restrictions on the amount of cars allowed to circulate during rush-hour traffic.
Other Brazilian cities that suffered power outages included Belo Horizonte in the state of Minas Gerais and Campinas, a large city about an hour outside of Sao Paulo.
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