Puerto Rico power restored to 47% of customers after island-wide blackout
By Scott DiSavino
(Reuters) -Puerto Rico power company Luma Energy said it had restored power to nearly half of its customers by early on Thursday after an island-wide blackout the day before.
"Our crews will continue working throughout the day to ensure that 90% of customers have service restored within the next 48 hours," Luma said in a statement.
On its website, it said 689,651, or 47%, of its roughly 1.5 million customers had service at 8:10 a.m. local time.
The power failure was the latest in a series of blackouts, most recently, on New Year's Eve, on the U.S. island territory after much of the grid had to be rebuilt following Hurricane Maria in 2017.
"As part of our response efforts, we are investigating the cause of this incident, including what role and effect the long-recognized impact of the fragility of the system had on this island-wide outage," Luma said.
"We remain committed to transforming the system into one that is safer and more reliable for all customers in Puerto Rico," it added.
Following overnight aerial patrols with helicopters, Luma said preliminary analysis suggested a number of factors had caused the power outage.
It cited a protection system failure as the trigger, followed by the presence of vegetation on a transmission line between Cambalache and Manatí.
Luma, which started operating the Puerto Rico power grid in 2021, is a joint venture between units of Canadian energy firm ATCO and U.S. construction and engineering firm Quanta Services.
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