LUMA crews worked overnight to restore power to about 350,000 customers impacted by a large outage event reported at 9 p.m. on June 12. As of 2:36 a.m. on June 13, LUMA teams, coordinated through the Transmission Operations Center, had restored most of the customers affected in the metropolitan area and the northeastern parts of the island. Currently 99% of customers are in service and LUMA crews continue working to restore service to remaining customers.
“I credit our team for a fast response; as soon as the outage was reported, we assumed an emergency posture, activated our Incident Command Structure, coordinated closely with generation operators and mobilized additional crews to help inspect lines for damage and expedite restoration,” said Juan Saca, president and CEO of LUMA.
While LUMA teams, including aviation, continued to patrol the lines the morning of June 13, the operator has identified the cause of the outage as faults on two transmission lines in San Juan and Aguas Buenas.
“While we worked safely and quickly overnight to restore service to the majority of our customers within approximately five hours, in a normal, more modern system, like the one we are building, this fault would not have contributed to such a large outage,” stated Saca. “We never want our customers to be without power and the critical projects that we have underway with FEMA, some scheduled for completion as early as next month, will address these underlying and long-standing vulnerabilities and make the system more reliable and more resilient,” Saca continued.
LUMA cited several projects already in progress or approved by FEMA that will address the issues within the fundamental design of Puerto Rico’s electric grid that contribute to large-scale cascaded outages by adding redundancy and resiliency to the system. This will increase reliability for customers and help avoid future large-scale outages. These projects include:
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A new transformer scheduled to be installed in Bayamón in July 2024, which will enhance system stability and resiliency, helping to prevent future large-scale outage events;
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LUMA’s island-wide FEMA-funded Vegetation Safety and Reliability Initiative, scheduled to begin in July 2024, will strategically clear vegetation from 16,000 miles of powerlines, which will have the single largest near-term impact on reliability of any program;
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The installation of distribution automation devices, which is technology that reduces the size and duration of outages and has already saved customers over 120 million minutes of interruptions;
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Substation High-Voltage Equipment and Component Replacement Projects, which will allow LUMA to replace key equipment in critical substations;
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The replacement of a critical transmission line from Ponce to Jobos, which has had a significant segment out of service since Hurricane Maria; and
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Eight new substations designed and submitted to FEMA for evaluation, which will improve system resiliency.
