Power restored to nearly all of Puerto Rico after massive New Year's Eve blackout
San Juan, Puerto Rico — Power was restored to nearly all electrical customers across Puerto Rico on Wednesday after a massive blackout left more than 1.2 million of the U.S. territory's 1.47 million clients.
Luma, a private company that oversees electricity transmission and distribution on the island, said by late Wednesday afternoon local time, power had been restored to nearly 98% of affected customers.
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.
Luma said its teams are continuing to work to restore power to the rest of its customers. 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 archipelago as people prepared to ring in the New Year.
Luma Energy spokesperson Hugo Sorrentini told CBS News the blackout was caused by a failure in one of the electric lines at one of the main power plants, called Costa Sur. The failure in the line caused the power plant to go out of service and then "created a waterfall effect in the system," he said, which led to the other power plants on the island going out of service.
A full investigation into what caused the electric line to fail was underway, Sorrentini said.
Reuters quoted Ivan Baez, a spokesperson for Puerto Rico's primary energy generator Genera, as saying the failure of the grid was believed to have been caused by a problem with a line operated by Luma, but that it had also brought down plants belonging to Genera and some other private electricity generators.
Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said in a post on social media that his administration was communicating with both Luma and Genera "regarding the massive blackout affecting a large part of the Island due to a critical fault."
He said work was underway to restore electrical supply and that the government was "demanding answers and solutions from both Luma and Genera, who must 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."
Governor-elect Jenniffer González Colón, who is set to take office on Thursday, warned that customers might experience interruptions in the coming days, with power plants not yet operating at maximum capacity.
"These days, I urge you to be moderate with your energy consumption to help reduce load shifting, so that more people can have access to electricity and the system can start up without any major setbacks," González Colón said on social media platform X.
Puerto Rico continues to struggle with chronic power outages blamed on a crumbling power grid that was razed by Hurricane Maria, a powerful category 4 storm that struck the island in September 2017. The system was already in decline prior to the storm given years of lack of maintenance and investment.
In a message posted Tuesday on social media, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has one of the biggest populations of Puerto Ricans in the continental U.S., said residents of the territory had been "treated as second class citizens for far too long."
"The fact that, as Americans, they don't have a reliable electric grid and suffer sporadic blackouts on a continuous basis is indefensible and would not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States," said Cuomo. "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."
