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Grid infrastructureArgentinaEIR-2279

Substation fire cuts grid power to La Punta data centre, Argentina

May 2021Published 12 Oct 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor

MinorElectrical
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supply cut for about •• daysShown in the record →Full estimate

What happened

Before dawn on a Saturday in May 2021, a fire at an electricity substation cut the utility power supply to the La Punta data centre, near the city of San Luis in Argentina. The power outage was detected at 2:55am. The substation sat in a separate building owned by the energy company, adjacent to the data centre. The data centre switched to its uninterruptible power supply and then ran on diesel generator power until the utility repaired the substation at 11:30am.

The provincial telecoms authority said the facility continued to operate normally and no services were affected. The data centre supports the province's government infrastructure, including a province-wide Wi-Fi network of 1,500 antennas.

Lessons learned

  1. Standby power for critical sites should be tested against prolonged loss of grid supply, since this site ran on UPS and then diesel generators until the upstream substation was repaired about 8.5 hours later.
  2. Where a data centre sits next to third-party grid equipment, operators should map the shared dependency and agree fire separation, isolation and notification arrangements with the owner of that equipment.
  3. Diesel fuel stocks and resupply contracts should be sized against the realistic repair time of upstream substations, not only against short outages.

More lessons on outages, backup supply and restoration, spacing, layout and fire spread, from every incident on the register.

Source

datacenterdynamics.com

Published 2026-10-12. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.

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Chart to reuse with this story: Grid infrastructure incidents by year, free with a credit (PNG).

Grid infrastructure incidents in Argentina: 2 entries, with a free alert for the next one.

Substation and transformer fires: the counts, the latest entries and a free alert for the next one.

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