This New Year’s Eve in Puerto Rico you will not only hear the fireworks and shots of each year’s farewell. You will also hear the hum of the electric plants and generators that have become a staple in almost all Puerto Rican homes to deal with the constant drops in electrical service. The island woke up on December 31 in the middle of another massive blackout, with almost 90% of customers without power. Luma Energy, the main operator and distributor of electrical energy in the United States, warned that the process of restoring service “will take between 24 and 48 hours, if conditions allow.”
The blackout began this Tuesday morning at around 5:30, after a breakdown at the Costa Sur power plant, located in the southern municipality of Guayanilla, caused a cascade effect and took all other generating plants out of service. At noon local time, 1,251,249 customers were without service, out of a total of 1,468,223, according to the latest data update on the Luma portal. A couple of hours earlier there were around 100,000 more customers without power, but Luma has already managed to restore service to some homes.
Others, however, are not only without electricity, but also without drinking water and with connection problems on their cell phones. The governor of the island, Pedro Pierluisi, assured that he is “in communication with Luma” and that he is demanding “answers and solutions” from them. “They have to expedite the restart of the generating units outside the fault area and keep the people duly informed about the measures they are taking to restore service throughout the island,” Pierluisi added on his social networks.
The elected governor of the island, Jenniffer González-Colón, from the same party as Pierluisi, the New Progressive Party, and who will take office on January 2, perhaps still in the middle of the blackout, also gave her opinion on the matter in X: “We cannot continue with an energy system that fails our people so much. Events such as this morning’s blackout and the uncertainty of a prompt energization of the island continue to affect our economy and quality of life,” he wrote. “For this reason I formed a Task Force of Energy and it will be the main priority when I enter into my duties as governor to provide our people with a stable electrical system,” she added.
For its part, Luma, the private consortium in charge of the transmission and distribution of energy in Puerto Rico since 2021, indicated in a statement that it has activated its Emergency Operations Center and that its teams are working “to restore electrical service to customers as quickly and safely as possible,” although it may take up to 48 hours to do so. Josué Colón, the executive director of the island’s Electric Power Authority, which is responsible for electricity generation, is less optimistic, telling Telemundo that lifting the system could be a multi-day process.
Puerto Rico has been dealing with critical blackouts for years due to the poor state of the island’s electricity grid, which the hurricane Maria completely destroyed in September 2017. Since then, lack of maintenance and investment, as well as subsequent storms, have left an unstable network that is at risk of collapsing with any disturbance to the system, no matter how minor.
To address this reality, the government of the island—an unincorporated territory of the United States, with an insular government—decided to privatize the electricity system, which until then was operated by a public agency, and in 2020 granted Luma a multimillion-dollar contract to maintain and modernize energy transmission and distribution routes. However, the company is often criticized for doing neither. Since their arrival on the island, the blackouts have not only not stopped, but have become constant, while the electricity rate has been increasing exponentially.
As a result, Luma has been the subject of massive protests in recent years, and many Puerto Ricans have demanded that the Government cancel its contract with the company. González-Colón promised during her campaign that she would cancel him as governor, but it remains to be seen if she actually keeps her promise, since her predecessor refused to do so despite citizens’ demands.
