Puerto Rico's routine outage duration rose 19% in 2025, reaching 36 hours per customer - 18 times the U.S. mainland average

New EIA reliability data published on 11 August 2026 show that Puerto Rico customers lost an average of 36 hours of power to outages not caused by major events in 2025, a 19% increase from 2024^[1]. The figure covers only so-called non-major-event days - the baseline, day-to-day performance of the grid, stripped of hurricane and storm credits.

How far Puerto Rico sits from the mainland norm

The gap with the rest of the United States is stark. Electricity customers on the U.S. mainland typically experience about two hours of non-major-event interruptions per year^[1], meaning Puerto Rico's 2025 figure is roughly 18 times higher. Averaged across the five years from 2021 to 2025, Puerto Rican customers have lost 29 hours of power annually to routine outages^[1] - itself well above the mainland norm even before the 2025 deterioration.

Duration is only part of the picture. The frequency of non-major-event interruptions has doubled in Puerto Rico since 2021 and rose a further 13% between 2024 and 2025, with the average customer experiencing almost 16 separate interruptions in 2025^[1].

What is driving the deterioration

There were no major hurricanes directly affecting Puerto Rico in 2025. Other events - including heavy rainfall and flooding concentrated between April and May - contributed to an additional 23 hours of major-event-day interruptions on top of the baseline figure.

The structural causes are well-documented. LUMA Energy, which has operated the transmission and distribution system since June 2021, reported in January 2026 that limited liquidity was constraining planned maintenance and preventive work, forcing crews to redirect resources toward reactive repairs on deteriorating equipment. Equipment failures - not vegetation contact - remained the leading cause of outage duration increases, according to LUMA's own data filed with the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (PREB).

The DOE has issued successive Section 202(c) emergency orders to PREPA since May 2025, authorizing dispatch of specific generation units and directing vegetation management along key transmission corridors. The most recent renewal, confirmed on 11 August 2026, extends those orders through 7 November 2026.

The regulatory and planning backdrop

Puerto Rico's 2025 Integrated Resource Plan projected that expected unserved energy - a generation-side reliability measure - stood at 154 hours per year in LUMA's most recent resource adequacy assessment, against an industry target of 2.4 hours. The IRP's preferred resource plan targets a 98% reduction in generation-driven customer outages by 2032, contingent on adding roughly 4,364 MW of new capacity by 2030.

The PREB has also moved to expand the metrics operators must report, requiring LUMA to file "all-in" SAIDI and SAIFI figures that capture generation-driven load-shedding, planned outages, and momentary interruptions - categories previously excluded from standard reporting. The intent is to give regulators and the public a fuller picture of system performance.

The numbers to watch in the coming months are whether the DOE emergency orders produce a measurable reduction in non-major-event SAIDI before the 2026 hurricane season peaks, and whether LUMA's liquidity position improves enough to resume the preventive maintenance programme that its own filings identify as the primary lever for reducing baseline outage duration.