Genera’s website showed two plants starting up again at 930am (930pm, Singapore time).
Ramon Luis Nieves, 49, an attorney in San Juan, said that New Year’s Eve is typically a time for family reunions, popping champagne bottles and watching fireworks. The power outage could mute celebrations this year, he said.
“My wife and I need to figure it out,” he said. “We can’t visit my wife’s family in the dark.”
He added that he’s not surprised by the outage, especially after Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm that hit the island hard in 2017.
Nieves, a former senator on the island territory, has long been a critic of operators of the power grid.
“It’s the whole island. This disaster has been more than a decade in the making,” he said. “The (power) generators are old, long past their life expectancy and the operators have failed to properly invest for years.”
Such sentiment is common on the Caribbean island, a U.S. territory whose residents are U.S. citizens but do not have voting representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Protesters have called for the island’s government to cancel its contract with power grid operator LUMA.
In response to a 2022 protest, LUMA said it had “inherited an electrical system that suffered years, in fact decades, of abandonment.”
