More than 40% of Puerto Rico customers without power after island-wide blackout

Cars drive through a dark street after Puerto Rico was hit with a massive power outage where energy plants across the island unexpectedly shut down, in San Juan, Puerto Rico Apr 16, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Arduengo

Nearly half of the homes and businesses in Puerto Rico that receive electricity from the commonwealth's main utility were still without power on Thursday, a day after a widespread blackout struck the island, Luma Energy said in a statement.

Hospitals, airports and prisons were among the structures still out.

Puerto Rico's electrical system has continued to falter since two powerful hurricanes devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, decimating the grid and killing nearly 3,000 people, according to official estimates. On New Year's Eve last year an underground power line was the most recent failure that led to island-wide blackouts.

By 1pm EST on Thursday, 826,572 Luma customers, or 56.3 percent of its total, had power restored.

"Our team will continue working throughout the day to ensure that 90 percent of customers  have service restored within the next 48 hours," the company said in a statement.

This time, a power line is also believed to have triggered outages.

Following overnight aerial patrols with helicopters, Luma said a 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 in the north of the island.

"As part of our response efforts, we are investigating the cause of this incident, including what role and effect the long-recognised impact of the fragility of the system had on this island-wide outage," Luma said.

Luma, which started operating the Puerto Rico power grid in 2021, is a joint venture between units of Canadian energy firm ATCO and US construction and engineering firm Quanta Services.