To help you and your family prepare, we wanted to inform you about a projected generation deficit that will result in temporary outages as we continue to stabilize the energy system following Tuesday’s island-wide outage. Even though all customers impacted by this island-wide outage have had their power restored, the energy system is still recovering, and we are working closely with our generation partners Genera, EcoEléctrica, and AES to add additional generation capacity. The energy system remains very fragile, and it is likely some customers will experience temporary service disruptions today between 5:45 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.
Status of Restoration Efforts
After the island-wide blackout, LUMA’s system was able to start re-energizing customers within 2 and a half hours. Within 28 hours, LUMA restored service to 95% of our total customers. As of 11:00 a.m. today, all municipalities have now had their service restored. Our team remains focused on stabilizing the energy system, which can result in a short-term loss of power, also known as a “load shed.” These temporary rotating outages, which we know are frustrating for our customers, are necessary to prevent larger-scale outages, and to help minimize the impact on your daily life.
It is essential that we both strengthen the transmission and distribution system and address the problem of Puerto Rico’s weak generation system. It is important to remember that we still do not have enough available generation on island to continuously and reliably serve the people of Puerto Rico. In the last year we have been forced to enact over 100 interruptions because of generation instability or a lack of sufficient generation capacity for LUMA to distribute.
I sincerely appreciate the real-life inconveniences and suffering the people of Puerto Rico have endured for too long and apologize to you and your family during this holiday season. Equally important, be assured that I am fully committed along with my colleagues to work diligently in continuously improving. We will continue to provide you with regular updates through our website, www.lumapr.com, our social media accounts, and media outlets.
Sincerely,
Juan Saca
