It will take at least another day to fully restore service after a series of failures blacked out the whole island on Wednesday, officials said.
Nearly 60 percent of Puerto Rico’s more than 1.4 million utility customers remained without power on Thursday, the morning after a blackout knocked all of the island’s functioning power plants offline and left the entire island in the dark.
Service was unlikely to be fully restored before the early hours of Friday, Josué Colón, Puerto Rico’s energy czar, said in a news conference early Thursday. That was how long it would take, he said, to get all the power plants back online after the systemwide shutdown.
“There’s still a long road for the recovery of more than 50 percent of the island,” Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón said.
As of 7 a.m. Thursday, about 610,000 customers — about 41.5 percent of the total — had electricity, according to Luma Energy, the private contractor that operates the island’s power transmission system. A utility customer may be a house, an apartment building, a business, a government building or some other facility.
Critical institutions that were back online Thursday included a number of hospitals and the airport in San Juan, the capital, Luma said in a statement.
The blackout happened because of a series of failures in the power transmission system, the company said, but why they happened has not yet been established. Luma has asked for three days to identify the likely cause.
The utility said that a preliminary review showed that something had gone wrong with a protective system that is intended to keep the entire power grid from shutting down when there is a breakdown on a single line — and that a transmission line in western Puerto Rico might have been affected by overgrowth.
Ms. González-Colón, who was elected last year after campaigning on a promise to cancel Luma’s contract, said the utility was required to patrol its lines by helicopter to spot overgrowth and prevent it from causing disruptions. Luma said it had been complying with that requirement, but the governor said she was skeptical and exasperated.
“It can’t happen that every time there’s a little branch, it knocks out not just a line but the entire system,” she said.
The governor also questioned whether the system was able to handle the higher demand for power during holidays, noting that the blackout on Wednesday happened during Holy Week, when many Puerto Ricans are on vacation, and that a similar blackout happened on New Year’s Eve.
Puerto Rico faces a looming power generation shortage. Officials warned last month that there would probably be insufficient power supply to meet peak demand over the summer. The government has solicited bids for an additional operator or operators to provide more power on the island.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
