Chile Says Blackout May Reoccur as Cuts Leave 80% Without Power

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Chileans braced for more blackouts after an outage yesterday left 80 percent of the population in a 2,000-kilometer (1,243-mile) stretch of the country with no electricity, the result of grid damage from last month's temblor.

"Things like this could happen in the future," Energy Minister Ricardo Raineri told reporters in Santiago yesterday. "Recovering the systems is a difficult task" after the Feb. 27 quake and there may be blackouts for "months," he said.

The power cut, which struck the country at about 8:43 p.m. local time yesterday, stretched from the Atacama desert in the north to the Chilean lakes in the south, plunging locals into darkness and forcing mines to switch on emergency generators.

The country's main power grid, called the Sistema Interconectado Central, was affected following a disruption at a substation at Charrua, 431 kilometers (268 miles) south of Santiago. The earthquake that devastated central Chile has left the power grid "fragile," Raineri said.

Codelco, the world's largest copper producer, said back-up systems were used in several of its mines during the power cut. The outage didn't cause "serious damage" to the El Teniente, Andina and Salvador mines and the Ventanas smelter, according to a company official briefed on the situation.

BHP Billiton Ltd., the world's largest mining company, said its Spence, Cerro Colorado and Escondida mines were unaffected as they are connected to a different power grid in the north of the country. Escondida is the world's biggest copper mine.

Xstrata Mines

Xstrata Plc mines in northern Chile are also unlikely to have been affected by electricity cuts as they are connected to a separate power grid, spokeswoman Viviana Alarcón said in a phone interview from Santiago.

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera plans to tap copper savings and may borrow abroad to pay for the estimated $30 billion cost of repairing damage caused by the 8.8-magnitude earthquake, he told reporters in Santiago on March 12.

Pinera said he plans to rewrite the 2010 budget to free up resources for a reconstruction fund, adding the government will also tap its savings. Chile has $11.3 billion invested overseas in an economic stabilization fund that the government can use to finance a budget deficit.