With Recovery From New Year’s Eve Outage Almost Complete, Puerto Rico Must Still Seek Solutions For Long Term Energy Challenges

On January 3, almost all LUMA customers had their power restored following a massive outage on December 31, 2024 that knocked out the entirety of Puerto Rico’s electricity supply. However, calculations by Luma indicate that demand will continue to challenge the company’s ability to maintain sufficient reserve capacity to meet the needs of consumers.  In the wee hours of the morning on New Year’s Eve, Puerto Rico was plunged into darkness by a power outage that affected the entire island. LUMA immediately activated its Emergency Operations Center, and had restored power to approximately 1.4 million customers by noon on January 1. However, hours later, a second issue at the Aguirre power station “caused a system-wide event that affected other generating plants,” according to LUMA, which interrupted service to almost 600,000 homes, businesses and other organizations. A second event at the same power plant at around 7 p.m. that day forced LUMA to implement load shedding practices. In a s...