Power restored across Puerto Rico after island-wide outage

Power in Puerto Rico was restored on Sunday after an island-wide outage impacted some 1.5 million people, according to the company that manages its power grid.

LUMA Energy’s Sunday announcement said that 99.7 percent of customers had their power restored and work was ongoing “to stabilize the grid and reduce the future risk of intermittent power outages.” 

The company said it was investigating the cause of the outage and would be “fully transparent with our customers, regulators, and the legislature” about the findings of that investigation. 

“While this thorough investigation, which includes a thorough independent forensic review of the failed equipment, will take some time, there is no doubt that this event has exposed the fragility of the energy grid and how important it is for all of us to work together to improve grid reliability,” LUMA president and CEO Wayne Stensby said in the statement. 

After Hurricane Maria devastated the territory’s electrical grid in 2017, LUMA took over transmitting and distributing power in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi (D) said in a tweet on Sunday that he would now “continue to focus on efforts to put an end to the fragility of the energy infrastructure and leave behind dependence on oil.” 

“We have started the complex process of transformation and reconstruction of our electrical system, since our people cannot continue to suffer the consequences of an old and obsolete system. That is my commitment,” he added.

Roughly 90 percent of customers already had their power restored on Saturday.

A fire on Wednesday at one of LUMA’s largest power plants, known as the Costa Sur Power Plant, prompted the outage, according to multiple reports. The fire may have been related to a circuit breaker failure, though the cause was not confirmed.