It was not immediately clear why every generating plant on the island went offline Wednesday. Puerto Rico has a history of problems with its electricity supply.

Patricia Mazzei

By Patricia Mazzei

Reporting from Miami

April 16, 2025

More than 1.4 million customers in Puerto Rico lost electricity on Wednesday when all of the island’s power plants were knocked out of service, the latest frustrating blackout for residents who have suffered years of them.

A preliminary review suggested the cause was a problem near a transmission line that began at 12:38 p.m., according to Josué Colón, the island’s energy czar. He said the work to restore the power would most likely extend well into Thursday.

“This process is not going to end today,” he said in a news conference on Wednesday afternoon. By late Wednesday, some power plants were slowly starting to turn back on, and 7 percent of customers had electricity restored, officials said.

The blackout led to gridlock on Puerto Rico’s roads as transit officers tried to direct cars at intersections with disabled traffic lights. People rushed to gas stations for fuel to power emergency generators. An urban train in San Juan, the capital, came to a stop, forcing passengers to clamber out and walk down an overpass. Plaza Las Américas, the island’s biggest mall, largely shut down.

Puerto Rico has suffered extensive power grid problems since Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, including periodic blackouts that have exasperated residents and businesses, forcing them to change or cancel plans and lose appliances and electronics to unpredictable power surges.

The island often recovers slowly from major power disruptions. It has taken as long as several days to restore service after similar blackouts in the past, including an archipelago-wide outage on New Year’s Eve. That blackout, like the one on Wednesday, included the smaller island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra. Hundreds of thousands of customers had also lost potable water service because of the outage.

Gary Soto, director of the energy management and transmission operation center for Luma Energy, the company that distributes power in Puerto Rico, said at the news conference that full restoration could take up to 72 hours. Daniel Hernández, vice president of operations for Genera PR, the company that generates power, said plants may come back online more quickly than in previous years because the company has invested in quicker restart systems.

“We have experienced a massive blackout across the entire island due to all of the power generation plants unexpectedly going offline,” Genera PR said in a social media post on Wednesday.Luma Energy said in a statement on Wednesday evening that a possible cause for the blackout was a “protection system failure,” followed by a problem with overgrowth along a transmission line in western Puerto Rico, but that analysis was preliminary.

Hospitals were running on generator power on Wednesday afternoon, according to Verónica Ferraiuoli, Puerto Rico’s designated secretary of state, who was acting as governor in the absence of Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón. The governor was away on vacation off the island but returned by Wednesday evening and appeared at a late-night news conference.

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“It is unacceptable that we have a failure of this magnitude in the electrical transmission system,” said Ms. González-Colón, who was elected last year after campaigning with a promise to end Luma Energy’s contract.

Many Puerto Ricans were preparing on Wednesday to be off work starting on Thursday as part of Holy Week, which also draws many tourists to the island.

Mr. Colón, the energy czar, had warned in a radio interview last month that Puerto Ricans were likely to experience summer blackouts because the island did not have enough generating capacity available to meet peak summer demand.

That warning prompted three Democratic members of Congress — Ritchie Torres of New York, Darren Soto of Florida and Pablo José Hernández, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting resident commissioner — to send a letter to the Trump administration on Tuesday, raising the alarm “about the imminent grid reliability crisis confronting Puerto Rico’s electric system.”

According to the letter, the island is projected to experience power shortfalls on 90 days between June and October.

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