Power restored to most of Puerto Rico following islandwide blackout

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, CMC – Power was restored to nearly all customers across Puerto Rico on Wednesday after a sweeping blackout plunged the US territory into darkness on New Year's Eve.

By Wednesday afternoon, power was back up for 98 per cent of Puerto Rico's 1.47 million utility customers, said Luma Energy, the private company overseeing transmission and distribution of power on the island.

Lights returned to households as well as to Puerto Rico's hospitals, water plants and sewage facilities after the massive outage that exposed the persistent electricity problems plaguing the island.

But, the company warned that customers could still see temporary outages in the coming days. It said full restoration across the island could take up to two days. "Given the fragile nature of the grid, we will need to manage available generation to customer demand, which will likely require rotating temporary outages,” Juan Saca, president of Luma Energy, said in a statement.

The lights went off in Puerto Rico at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, darkening almost the entire island as people prepared to ring in the New Year. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the outage, but Luma Energy said a preliminary review pointed to a failure in an underground electric line in the south of the territory.The island's power grid was ravaged in September 2017 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm.

Unreliable electricity remains frustratingly common, hindering daily life for Puerto Ricans. In June, over 340,000 customers were left without electricity as people reeled from soaring temperatures. At the peak of Hurricane Ernesto, in August, over half of all utility customers lost power. Tens of thousands of people remained without electricity a week after the storm.

The New Year's Eve outage came as clients braced for a hike in electricity rates.

Last month, Puerto Rico's Energy Bureau approved an increase of 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour for residential customers from January through March, causing electric bills for the average household to jump by nearly US$20.

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