Puerto Rico suffers major blackout

• 9 days ago (2025-04-17)
• David Flin

Distribution 135 Latin America 88 Transmission 206

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

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.