Power outage hits northern Mexico after cold snap roils Texas

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico is working to fix a power outage caused by a cold snap in the north of the country that hit around 400,000 users and hammered neighboring Texas, authorities said on Monday.

Amid the bad weather, national electricity grid operator CENACE said on Twitter the outage had come about due to a shortage of natural gas and some transmission problems.

The freeze hit Texas hard, knocking out power for more than 2 million customers there.

Speaking at a regular news conference, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said some 400,000 users in Mexico had been affected, but forecast the problem would be quickly resolved.

Mexican national power utility, the Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE), said the weather had led to pipelines freezing in the United States, and meant supplies of natural gas were being prioritized for homes and hospitals there.

The CFE said it had made energy from other sources available, and was using gas reserves to help cover shortfalls.

The outage affected about 6,950 megawatts of load, CENACE said, urging consumers in the border states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas and Chihuahua to cut back on electricity usage. The state of Coahuila was also affected, Lopez Obrador said.

Gas-powered plants in the states of Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango could also feel supply shortages, the CFE said.

Lopez Obrador dismissed suggestions the outage could be linked to a "boycott" of Mexico by private power generators upset at his plan to strengthen the CFE at their expense.

An energy nationalist, Lopez Obrador wants to bolster state control of the industry, arguing that previous governments skewed the power market in favor of the private sector.

In late December, an outage in the Mexican network left 10.3 million users without power for up to two hours.

(Reporting by Sharay Angulo; Writing by Dave Graham; Editing by Richard Chang)