(MENAFN- The Rio Times) A sudden power outage on October 14 left millions in Brazil without electricity and briefly darkened critical sites from airports to hospitals. Authorities said the trigger was a fire at a high-voltage substation in Paraná. Power was restored quickly-most of the North, Northeast, Southeast, and Center-West within about 90 minutes, and the South in roughly two and a half hours-but the incident highlighted a larger weakness: transmission bottlenecks rather than a shortage of generation. That weakness has been mounting. In the first half of 2025, there were 22 large-scale power cuts of at least 100 MW lasting ten minutes or more, interrupting a total of 7,914 MW-nearly double the 4,084 MW recorded across 13 events in the first half of 2023. Experts point to limited redundancy in key corridors and the need for predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and faster protection schemes so local faults don't cascade nationally. Brazil's grid is grappling with a paradox. Built around big hydro in the 1960s and 1970s, it now serves a system that is nearly 90 percent renewable. On windy, sunny, low-demand hours, the operator orders“curtailment” to avoid overloads-wasting clean energy and imposing losses now estimated in the billions of reais. Since 2023, wind producers report roughly R$5.0 billion ($943 million) in forced reductions and solar about R$1.2 billion ($226 million) in 2025 alone. Balancing Solar Surge and Data-Center Demand The operator warns curtailment could reach 40,000 MW by 2029 and affect up to 84 percent of midday hours. Rooftop and small-scale solar already exceed 18 percent of installed capacity and could reach 24 percent by 2029, much of it outside direct dispatch control. Meanwhile, Brasília is courting hyperscale computing. A new special tax regime (MP 1.318/2025,“Redata”) earmarks R$5.2 billion ($981 million) in incentives next year to reshore data processing-today largely done abroad. One flagship is ByteDance 's planned data center in Ceará, around R$50 billion ($9.43 billion), advancing after earlier grid-connection hurdles. Local communities have questioned water use (about 30,000 liters/day, with a reuse plant planned) and consultation. Why it matters: Reliability, prices, and Brazil's digital strategy now hinge on matching rapid renewable growth and data-center demand with upgraded transmission, storage, demand response, and firm backup power. Without that, the country will waste clean energy on good days-and risk blackouts on bad ones.

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