Puerto Rico power outage affects over 197,000 customers

A sudden failure at the Costa Sur power plant in Guayanilla has left more than 197,000 customers in Puerto Rico without electricity. The outage occurred following the abrupt shutdown of units 5 and 6 at the facility.

LUMA Energy, the company responsible for transmission and distribution, reported that the loss of generation capacity necessitated emergency load shedding to prevent a total collapse of the island's electrical grid. As of 3:00 p.m. local time, official monitoring recorded 197,674 customers without service out of a total of 1.4 million subscribers.

The incident has sparked public dissatisfaction. While citizens have directed criticism toward LUMA Energy regarding service stability, the company has attributed the issue to generation deficiencies managed by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (AEE) and other private generators. The island's power infrastructure remains fragile following the damage caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017.