Utility Watch: LUMA's Worst Year Yet for Outages and for Waiting

The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau’s performance filings now run through July 2026. Customers averaged 28.4 hours without power in the fiscal year that ended in June 2026, against 26.3 hours the year before.

That is the worst of the five full fiscal years LUMA has run the transmission and distribution system, which it took over in June 2021. The power went out 8.0 times for the average customer that year.

The queue at LUMA’s customer-service centres averaged 11.1 minutes through fiscal 2026, the longest of LUMA’s full years. A year earlier it was 7.8 minutes. Both are better than the 15.8 minutes of fiscal 2021, which PREPA ran.

The power went out about as often as it did in fiscal 2020 — 8.0 times against 8.2. It stayed out for 28.4 hours instead of 20.3.

Four names run through these filings. The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau is the regulator: it approves rates and receives this data, and operates nothing. LUMA Energy has run transmission and distribution under contract since 1 June 2021 — the poles, the wires and the customer relationship — but does not own the grid and does not generate electricity. Genera PR operates the power plants. PREPA, the public utility, still owns the assets, and every fiscal year before 2022 below is PREPA’s record however the filing is labelled.

How often the power went out, and for how long

The Bureau tracks the grid with two numbers. SAIDI adds up the time the average customer spent without power over a year. SAIFI counts how many separate times the lights went out. They have not moved together.

Both numbers are island-wide averages, and the Bureau defines them as arithmetic: SAIDI is every customer-minute of interruption added up and divided by the customers served; SAIFI counts every customer interruption and divides it the same way. They describe a system, not a household. The spread underneath is wide — 61.9 hours in one LUMA region against 12.6 in another, the same year — which is what the next section is for.

What the Bureau does not publish beside these figures is the counting rule: whether an interruption has to last a minimum time before it counts, and whether days of major storm damage are set aside. Utilities elsewhere commonly do both, and either would move these numbers. The dashboard does not say.

Where the hours fell

The island figure is an average across a system that does not fail evenly. LUMA files the same measure for each of its sixteen operating regions — districts named for a hub town, each covering its neighbours too.

On the phone and at the counter

The people who run it

LUMA employed 2,552 people in June 2021, the month it took the grid over. It has 4,077 now, after a peak of 4,895 in July 2024. Turnover averaged 1.9% of staff a month through fiscal 2026.

The data

Every number in this piece comes from the Bureau’s PREPARE performance dashboard, read 2026-09-16. We publish the reduction we work from as open data at 787daily.com/api/preb-filings.json — the fiscal-year totals, the regional breakdown, and the monthly series behind them.

This is the first Utility Watch. Filings are quarterly and are revised retroactively — a figure here can change in a later filing. The Bureau also publishes budget percentages; they carry no published definition, so they are not reported here.