Fredo Rojas, owner of Fredo’s Restaurant in Humacao, denounced Puerto Rico’s electric system on Wednesday after his business lost power following a transformer explosion. In a video posted on social media, Rojas said he had just paid a $4,000 electricity bill for his restaurant this same week, that all his employees were left waiting outside, and that the outage hit just as he received a food delivery.
He called the electric infrastructure prehistoric and denounced the difficulties merchants face keeping operations running. Genera PR, the private company that operates, maintains and manages the island’s power generation fleet, said through spokesman Iván Báez that it does not rule out more outages on Wednesday due to lack of generation. Báez acknowledged several plants are facing operational problems that have reduced the system’s capacity, with breakdowns costing about 300 additional megawatts, and named the Costa Sur and San Juan plants among those affected.
He said Genera has been operating with limited production capacity for about two weeks. LUMA Energy vice president José Pérez reported that more than 150,000 subscribers lost power overnight Tuesday because of generation deficiencies, and that the situation forces use of emergency units running on costlier fuels. Genera’s portal showed total generation of 2,151 megawatts around 1:40 PM, available capacity of 2,714 MW, a rotating reserve of 469 MW and an operational reserve of 567 MW.