SAN JUAN – Luma Energy, the company in charge of the transmission and distribution of electricity in Puerto Rico, announced this Sunday that the 99.7% of the electricity service on the island after the massive blackout on the 6th.
This is equivalent to 1.5 million residential and commercial customers, Luma indicated in a press release.
“We want to thank our customers for their incredible patience, support and understanding during this difficult time,” Luma president Wayne Stensby said in the statement.
The businessman highlighted the work of the work teams of Luma and the Electric Power Authority (PREPA) , the state company in charge of grid generation, for “restoring power as quickly and safely as possible.”
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— LUMA Puerto Rico (@lumaenergypr) April 10, 2022
“We want to acknowledge and thank PREPA and the other generators for their hard and collaborative work in difficult conditions,” he said.
The blackout, caused on the 6th by a breakdown in the Costa Sur power station in Guayanilla (south), caused the total loss of electricity service on the island.
However, the exact fault is still unknown.
“We understand that many are wondering how and why such a large outage occurred,” Stensby said.
Given this, he announced that the energy system operators began a detailed investigation into this event “and we will be fully transparent with our customers, regulators and the Legislature with our findings to determine what actions should be taken to reduce the threat of such large interruptions” .
“Although this exhaustive investigation, which includes an independent forensic review of the failed, it will take some time, there is no doubt that this event has exposed the fragility of the energy network and how important it is for all of us to work together to improve the reliability of the network”, he stated.
Stensby also acknowledged that Luma and PREPA “continues to work to stabilize the network and reduce the future risk of intermittent power outages”.
When this work is completed, Luma will go back to normal operations, including the deactivation of the Operations Center company’s Emergency Department, Stensby said.