Puerto Rico suffers another major blackout

Puerto Rico's loss of public power since 12:40 p.m. Wednesday has led people to criticize the Oversight Board, governor, the electric power authority and the electric generation and transmission and distribution companies.

The outage is part of a long history of frequent and prolonged public power outages affecting the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which is now approaching eight years in bankruptcy.

All customers lost power Wednesday afternoon. The electric transmission and distribution company LUMA Energy said at 10:45 a.m. Thursday, power had been restored to about half of its customers but that it would take 48 hours to restore power to 90% of them.

"The Board's eight-year strategy for breaking deals, advancing meritless legal theories,​developing fiscal plans that do not properly reflect the prospects of Puerto Rico and PREPA, and refusing to negotiate with its bondholders in good faith has unnecessarily prolonged PREPA's stay in bankruptcy and cut off its access to the public market financing it has needed to refurbish its electric system and improve its reliability," said Tom Lauria, counsel to GoldenTree Asset Management, one of the financial firms working against the Oversight Board's proposed plan of adjustment.

Former Puerto Rico Oversight Board Member Justin Peterson said the Oversight Board "owns" the outage in a post on the X platform. "It alone made the decision to hire unqualified firms LUMA and NFE [parent of electricity generator Genera PR]."

It is time for Donald Trump to "fire" the Oversight Board, Peterson said.

Puerto Rico Clearinghouse Principal Cate Long said on X Puerto Rico's elected government and the board gave control of PREPA to companies that have "almost no experience managing utilities," resulting in high costs and frequent power outages. She said the utility should be either federalized or LUMA and Genera PR should be replaced.

The Oversight Board, LUMA and Genera PR didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The board said in PREPA's March approved fiscal plan the system's reliability remained poor. It said the system's interruption frequency index in 2024 was 7.8 times worse than the United States median and 3.3 times worse than the 90^th percentile for electric systems. It said the system's outage duration index in 2024 was 13.2 times worse than the U.S. median and 4.2 times worse than the 90^th percentile.

The board attributed these shortcomings to geographic challenges, climate and natural disaster factors, and challenges to the system's generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure.

Puerto Rico residents circled the governor's mansion, where Gov. Jenniffer González Colón lives, Wednesday night, making noise to protest the situation.

González Colón said she would look into terminating the territory's contract with LUMA.