Puerto Rico suffered an island-wide blackout on 16 April, leaving all 1.4 million electricity consumers without power at one point.

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EU-PVSEC 2026

The outage began at 12.40 pm local time, when all of the island’s power plants unexpectedly went offline, according to Genera Puerto Rico , the company responsible for most of the island’s electricity generation. The outage was caused by a failure in a transmission line between EcoEléctrica and Costa Sur.

Full restoration is expected to take 48-72 hours, although around 6000 customers had their power restored within a few hours.

Despite efforts to modernise the island’s energy grid, it remains heavily dependent on oil-fired power plants, which supply 62 per cent of the island’s energy. Natural gas supplies 24 per cent, coal 8 per cent, and renewables 7 per cent.