BAYAMÓN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Power was restored to nearly all electrical customers across Puerto Rico on Wednesday after a sweeping blackout plunged the U.S. territory into darkness on New Year’s Eve.
By Wednesday afternoon, power was back up for 98% of Puerto Rico’s 1.47 million utility customers, said Luma Energy, the private company overseeing transmission and distribution of power in the archipelago. Lights returned to households as well as to Puerto Rico’s hospitals, water plants and sewage facilities after the massive outage that exposed the persistent electricity problems plaguing the island.
Still, the company warned that customers could still see temporary outages in the coming days. It said full restoration across the island could take up to two days.
“Given the fragile nature of the grid, we will need to manage available generation to customer demand, which will likely require rotating temporary outages,” Juan Saca, president of Luma Energy, said in a statement.
The lights went off in Puerto Rico at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, darkening almost the entire archipelago as people prepared to ring in the New Year. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the outage, but Luma Energy said a preliminary review pointed to a failure in an underground electric line in the south of the territory.
Governor-elect Jenniffer González Colón, who is set to take office on Thursday, warned that customers might experience interruptions in the coming days, with power plants not yet operating at maximum capacity.
“These days, I urge you to be moderate with your energy consumption to help reduce load shifting, so that more people can have access to electricity and the system can start up without any major setbacks,” González Colón said on social media platform X.
On the campaign trail, González Colón had promised to appoint an “energy czar” to oversee the operation of the power grid, which has long been fragile and faulty due to years of neglect.
The island's power grid was ravaged in September 2017 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm.
Unreliable electricity remains frustratingly common, hindering daily life for Puerto Ricans. In June, over 340,000 customers were left without electricity as people reeled from soaring temperatures. At the peak of Hurricane Ernesto, in August, over half of all utility customers lost power. Tens of thousands of people remained without electricity a week after the storm.
The New Year’s Eve outage came as clients brace for a hike in electricity rates. Last month, Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau approved an increase of 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour for residential customers from January through March, causing electric bills for the average household to jump by nearly $20, the Energy Bureau says.
FILE - A utility pole with loose cables towers over a home in Loiza, Puerto Rico, Sept. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Alejandro Granadillo, File)
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González, who the United States recognized as the winner of last year's presidential election, kicked off a tour of Latin America on Saturday, just days before President Nicolás Maduro is set to be sworn in for a third term in defiance of international pressure.
A crowd of a few hundred Venezuelan migrants broke into shouts of “Edmundo, Presidente” as González emerged from a meeting with Argentine President Javier Milei to wave to supporters from the balcony of the iconic Casa Rosada, or Pink House, in Buenos Aires.
“We are doing whatever the cause of freedom requires,” Milei, an effusive far-right supporter of the Venezuelan opposition, said as he welcomed González to the presidential palace with honors normally reserved for a head of state.
González, a retired diplomat, fled into exile in Spain in September after a judge issued an arrest warrant following the July 28 presidential election, in which Maduro was declared the winner by the National Electoral Council, which is stacked with governing party loyalists.
In recent weeks, he has been vowing to travel to Venezuela to be sworn in for the presidential term, which according to law must begin on Jan. 10. But he hasn't said how he plans to return or wrest power from Maduro, whose party controls all institutions and the military.
On Thursday, Maduro’s government raised the stakes even further, announcing a $100,000 reward for information on González’s whereabouts and plastering the wanted-like bulletin with the retired diplomat's photo on social media and the arrivals board at the country's main airport.
Upon arrival to the Argentine capital, where he twice served as Venezuela’s ambassador more than two decades ago, González posted on social media a short video message expressing solidarity with those imprisoned in Venezuela as part of a crackdown by Maduro.
He said that he would raise with Milei concerns about the well-being of five Maduro opponents who have been sheltering in the Argentine ambassador’s residence in Caracas for nearly 10 months — a diplomatic standoff that has embittered relations between Venezuela and Argentina.
The Biden administration and most European governments have rejected the election's official results, pointing out that authorities didn't provide detailed results as they have in past elections. Meanwhile, copies of tally sheets collected by the opposition from 85% of the nation’s electronic voting machines show that González prevailed by a more than two-to-one margin.
González, 75, was a previously unknown career diplomat when he was thrust into rallying the anti-Maduro coalition as a last-minute stand-in for opposition stalwart María Corina Machado, whom the government banned from running for office.
After speaking with Milei on Saturday, González is scheduled to cross the Rio de la Plata for a meeting with Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou.
A wanted sign of Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez is displayed on the list of departure flights at the Simon Bolivar International Airport in Maiquetia, near Caracas, Venezuela, Friday, Jan. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Cristian Hernandez)
