ACC News Brief
Climate Resilience Puerto Rico, United States
Puerto Rico's chronic grid outages rose to 36 hours per customer in 2025
What happened
The U.S. Energy Information Administration says Puerto Rico electricity customers experienced an average of 36 hours without power in 2025 when major-event days were excluded, 19% more than in 2024. From 2021 through 2025, the island averaged 29 outage hours per customer per year, compared with roughly two hours for mainland U.S. customers.
Why it matters
Frequent outages raise health, safety, food-storage, water, and business risks before extreme weather is added. The figures do not establish climate attribution, but they show why grid maintenance, distributed backup power, storage, and transparent reliability reporting remain central to resilience.
What to watch
- Whether reliability improves as generation, transmission, and distribution projects move forward.
- How quickly distributed solar, batteries, and community resilience hubs reach high-risk customers.
- Future utility reports, including how technical major-event-day exclusions affect comparisons.
Sources & evidence
- Puerto Rico electricity customers experienced longer outages in 2025U.S. Energy Information Administration analysis published August 10, 2026, using utility-reported reliability indicators that exclude major-event days.
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