January 2, 2025
Power Restored To 98% Of Puerto Rico After New Years Eve Blackout
Nearly 1.5 million Puerto Rican citizens were left without power while ringing in the New Year due to an island wide blackout.
Puerto Rico finally has power again. Nearly all Luma electric customers had power after January 1, following a disruptive blackout across the island that left over 1.2 million households in the dark.
The private company that oversees electricity transmission and distribution on the island, Luma, announced that power has been restored to 98% of their customer base, including Puerto Rico’s hospitals, sewage facilities, and water plants.
Luma declared that the company’s employees are still working hard to get power to the last of their customers, but total power restoration could take up to two days all across the island.
President of Luma Energy Juan Saca said, “Given the fragile nature of the grid, we will need to manage available generation to customer demand, which will likely require rotating temporary outages.”
According to previous reports, the power went out across Puerto Rico early on Tuesday morning, just before the New Year.
As reported by CBS News, a Luma Energy spokesperson claimed that the blackout was a product of a failure in one of the several main electric lines at the island’s main power plants. The failure was so catastrophic that it took down power through the entire plant and then “created a waterfall effect in the system, which led to the other power plants on the island going out of service.”
Although the initial outages began at one of Luma’s plants, the affected power plants extended to even those owned by Puerto Rico’s primary energy generator — Genera — as well as some other private electricity generators on the island.
The blackout has exposed a chronically growing issue with electricity in Puerto Rico, which the 2017 Category 4 Hurricane Maria has exasperated. The power system across the island has been suffering from blackouts and a lack of maintenance and financial investment from the U.S. government.
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke out about the American government’s lack of action in Puerto Rican affairs. He wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, “Puerto Ricans have been treated as second-class citizens for far too long.”
He continued in the post, “The fact that, as Americans, they don’t have a reliable electric grid and suffer sporadic blackouts continuously is indefensible and would not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States. The federal government must finally acknowledge its responsibility to Puerto Rico and provide the resources and expertise necessary to end this cycle of insanity once and for all.”
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