MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Power restored to customers in Santiago Metropolitan Region

The electricity company Enel now faces other challenges, Pardow stressed

The Chilean Government said Friday that the electricity company Enel had met Thursday's goal to restore supply to 20,000 households in the Santiago Metropolitan Region (MR) after an outage that lasted seven days.

According to Undersecretary of the Interior Manuel Monsalve, all 21,468 customers had their service restored. A total of “25 generators with a capacity of at least 1 megawatt were made available to Enel and are currently installed in some places in the Metropolitan Region,” the official elaborated.

However, Enel's contract still hangs in the balance. Compliance does not stop the expiration process, Energy Minister Diego Pardow explained. It only stops the termination process at the so-called “requirements” stage. The new goal for Enel is to reconnect some 14,000 households beyond the MR in the next 48 hours.

“The reason for the longer time and lower number of customers ... has to do, first, with the fact that this is what is established in the replacement plan that was presented in the company and, from a substantive perspective, it means that as we move from high to low voltage, the recovery of customers is slower and, in turn, we move from areas that are with greater urban density, therefore, with greater inhabitant per square kilometer, to areas with fewer inhabitants per square kilometer,” Pardow outlined. Over 61,000 customers were still powerless early Friday from Coquimbo to Los Lagos.

“The law has been violated in all its standards, both the supply replacement standards and the customer information standards, and in the different service quality requirements since the weekend,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Public Works Ministry lifted approximately 1,500 fallen trees, at least 280 of them in the MR that were involved in power-line layouts.

Monsalve also pointed out that there were 5,809 families without service since Aug. 1; 18,084 since Aug. 2; 3,891 since Aug. 3; and 3,812 since Aug. 4.

“The legal responsibility to restore electricity supply lies with the companies. The ultimatum is an ultimatum to comply with the law. The ultimatum is an ultimatum for the companies to comply with what they have committed to in the regulatory framework of our country. A commitment that is not only legal, that is not only regulatory but also an ethical commitment in terms of the quality of the service provided,” he stressed.

In this scenario, Foreign Minister Alberto van Klaveren admitted Italian authorities had been contacted given Enel's mismanagement of the crisis which triggered the termination of the concession.