This article was updated on Wednesday, March 5 at 4:45 p.m.

The lights — and air conditioning — went out at the Casa Rosada on Wednesday afternoon as swaths of Buenos Aires City were hit with a power outage in 30°C heat. The energy distribution company Edesur suffered two massive power failures in a day, halting trains and the subway as well as leaving hundreds of thousands without electricity.

“The current outage is due to a failure in two 220 KV high voltage lines of Costanera-Hudson which belong to the electricity distribution company Edesur. It’s affecting the south of Buenos Aires City and Greater Buenos Aires,” read a communiqué from the Energy Secretariat on the afternoon power cut which started at 12:40 p.m. 

Edesur had suffered a similar blackout in the early hours of Wednesday, which stopped the subway, darkened traffic lights and left 622,000 people without power. The secretariat reported that another 366,000 homes were left without electricity in the second power outage in the afternoon. Edesur reported at 4:30 p.m. that the company had restored power to 70% of the affected users. 

The communiqué added that the power outages in the city did not affect the national grid and the state’s energy regulator ENRE was looking into the blackout.

Several subway lines were also “interrupted due to lack of external power supply” according to Emova, the company that operates the Buenos Aires subway. Most had returned to normal at the time of writing, with the E line running only between the stations Boedo and Plaza de los Virreyes.

https://x.com/C5N/status/1897331735769027066?t=k_ePOzUBZkprIEiOlIE-tw&s=08 

Earlier Wednesday, ENRE had published a post with electricity-saving tips to celebrate World Energy Efficiency Day.