According to a posting on Gov. Pedro Pierluisi’s X Account, a critical failure in Puerto Rico’s power grid has caused a massive blackout affecting a large part of the island.
According to LUMA Energy (the Canadian-American company in charge of power distribution and transmission) on the island, nearly 1.3 million users, or 88% were affected by the New Year’s Eve power outage.
Pierluisi reported that “work is underway” to restore the San Juan and Palo Seco power plants.
We demand answers and solutions both from Luma and Genera. They must speed up the restart of generating units outside the area of fault and keep the public informed about their plans to restore service across the island.
Luma Energy’s Emergency Operations Center, in collaboration with Genera, and other power partners, is working to restore electrical power and the system to the island, as soon as possible. This follows a total power outage that began at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday.
The company said that the full restoration will take a few days.
This is not the first time Puerto Rico’s inconsistency has led to a widespread power failure.
Puerto Ricans have long been frustrated by power outages, which are caused by an unstable and poorly maintained grid. Modernization efforts, initially by a public entity, and now by a private company, took several decades to be implemented.
After Hurricane Maria, the collapse of the grid left thousands of people without electricity for several months. This was the biggest blackout in US History in terms of total hours of lost electricity.
Since then, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency has awarded $9.9 billion for permanent projects to repair damage caused by Hurricane María. LUMA Energy took over management of the grid in 2021 from the government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA. Genra PR is in charge of energy production and initiated operations in 2023.
The challenges are still there. According to LUMA Energy, after Hurricane Ernesto, in August, approximately half of all island electric customers were without power at some point.