Power Restored to Nearly All of Puerto Rico After Massive Blackout
After some areas of Puerto Rico welcomed the New Year in the dark, service has been restored to nearly all impacted customers. According to LUMA Energy, the company responsible for power lines and transmission towers across the island, about 1.4 million users, or at least 98% of the total, had service on Wednesday morning.
The massive blackout, which began in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, highlighted the years-long issues with Puerto Rico’s crumbling power grid. The cause of the blackout is still under investigation, but it appears to have been triggered by an issue with an underground line, which led to a breakdown in the transmission and distribution system.
Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi spoke with President Joe Biden and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, who reiterated the federal government’s commitment to assisting the island in rebuilding its electric system. Governor-elect Jenniffer González-Colón has also pledged to ensure power restoration is carried out in a coordinated, safe manner with a sense of urgency.
The Puerto Rico Power Authority, a government-owned corporation, has contracted LUMA Energy to manage the power grid and Genera to lead energy production operations. The corporation has struggled with long-lasting structural issues with both generation and distribution, which contributed to the massive blackout.
This is not the first time Puerto Rico’s power system has faltered on a mass scale. Hurricane Maria left hundreds of thousands of people without power for months in 2017, and about half of all electric customers on the island were without power last year following Hurricane Ernesto.
