BAYAM N, Puerto Rico After a widespread blackout swept the U.S. island into darkness on New Year’s Eve, power was restored to almost all electricity consumers in Puerto Rico on Wednesday.
98% of Puerto Rico’s 1.47 million utility customers had power restored by Wednesday afternoon, according to Luma Energy, the private organization in charge of the archipelago’s power transmission and distribution. Following the catastrophic outage that revealed the island’s ongoing energy issues, lights were restored to homes, hospitals, water plants, and sewage facilities throughout Puerto Rico.
Customers may still experience brief interruptions in the days ahead, the business cautioned. It could take up to two days for the entire island to be fully restored.
According to a statement from Juan Saca, president of Luma Energy, “we will need to manage available generation to customer demand given the fragile nature of the grid, which will likely require rotating temporary outages.”
As people got ready to ring in the New Year, Puerto Rico’s lights went out about 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, casting darkness over nearly the entire archipelago. Although Luma Energy stated a preliminary examination indicated a collapse in an underground power line in the southern part of the region, authorities are still looking into what caused the outage.
With power plants not yet running at full capacity, customers may encounter disruptions in the days ahead, warned Jenniffer González Colón, the governor-elect who will take office on Thursday.
These days, I encourage you to use energy sparingly in order to lessen load shifting, increase the number of people who have access to electricity, and ensure that the system starts up without any significant issues. On the social media site X, Gonz lez Coln stated.
Gonz lez Coleman had pledged during the campaign to name an energy czar to supervise the functioning of the electrical grid, which has long been brittle and flawed as a result of years of neglect.
Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm in September 2017, devastated the island’s electrical grid.
Puerto Ricans’ everyday lives are hampered by the frustratingly widespread prevalence of unreliable electricity. As temperatures skyrocketed in June, more than 340,000 consumers were left without power. More than half of all utility customers lost power during Hurricane Ernesto’s peak in August. A week after the hurricane, tens of thousands of people still had no electricity.
As customers prepare for an increase in electricity prices, there was an outage on New Year’s Eve. The typical household’s power bills increased by about $20 last month after Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau approved a 2.2 cent per kilowatt-hour hike for residential users from January through March, according to the Energy Bureau.
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