Following outage, Justice Minister to scrutinize São Paulo power supplier

The Justice Ministry announced on Monday that its consumer protection agency will notify private electricity distributor Enel over the long power outage that has affected millions of people in the state of São Paulo since a massive storm on Friday.

Enel, an Italian multinational group, won back in 2018 a public bidding process to acquire Eletropaulo, a now-defunct state-owned power company.

The storm, with winds of over 150 kilometers per hour, killed seven people, wreaked havoc in several cities, and left millions without electricity for hours or days. Enel informed on Monday that 24 percent of the consumers under its responsibility were still without power. This comprises about 800,000 homes, 500,000 of which in São Paulo city alone.

“Due to the complexity of the work to rebuild the network affected by fallen trees and branches, recovery is being carried out gradually,” Enel said in a statement. Many say the damage would be mitigated if the power cable network were completely underground. But experts say that would be very expensive and mean higher electricity bills for consumers — something politicians are always reluctant to do.

The Justice Ministry will require Enel to provide information, within 24 hours, about customer service channels, how it is getting electricity back to consumers, and plans to compensate consumers. The government will also provide guidelines for consumers to get compensation, for instance, for food and medication that require refrigeration and were lost due to the outage.

The press office of federal electricity regulator Aneel told The Brazilian Report that its representatives will attend a meeting on Monday afternoon at the headquarters of the São Paulo state government to discuss upcoming “preventive measures to make the distribution network less vulnerable to climate events.”

Enel did not immediately reply about the upcoming notification from the Justice Ministry.

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