• Puerto Rico's power was restored after a New Year's Eve blackout sent the island into darkness.
• Still, the island's power company warned that there could be more electricity outages.
• Local business owners in San Juan told BI about their struggles to recover.

Small business owners and workers in Puerto Rico say they're struggling to recover from a massive power outage earlier this week that left the entire island without electricity.

Puerto Rico's electricity has mostly been restored after the blackout on New Year's Eve cut the power for more than 1.2 million customers. But the local energy company warned that it may need to schedule more rolling outages because the power grid is so fragile.

One business owner told BI that they'd tried their best to recover from the New Year's Eve outage, only to be hit with another outage on Friday

"It's very, very surreal because we were about to have the whole system online today — and the technicians were already working before we opened the lunch service — and all of a sudden the system went out again," Gabriel Hernandez, the chef and co-owner of Verde Mesa restaurant in San Juan, told Business Insider.

The restaurant had already had to cancel its New Year's Eve dinner service because even though power was restored on Tuesday afternoon, it was too late to scramble to open.

"Once the power's restored, there's another layer of work that has to be done, which is to check our produce, check if our refrigerators are working, check our antenna and WiFi," Hernandez said.

And in the days since, he's also had to reduce the restaurant's seating capacity to below 50% of normal, he said. The blackout caused the restaurant's WiFi antenna to go out, downing its point-of-sale system, which Hernandez said he hasn't been able to get fixed.

Operating at less than half capacity has been especially difficult during one of the busiest weeks of the year, he said. He estimated the restaurant's losses are already in the thousands of dollars.

And, he said, the restaurant will never be able to make that back. "Unless we have somebody inject money that we lost, we don't recuperate money," Hernandez said.

Puerto Rico's power company warns of more outages

Luma Energy, the private company that transmits and distributes power in the territory, said in an X post on Thursday morning that 99% of its 1.4 million customers were back in service. It didn't respond to multiple inquiries from Business Insider.

The company urged customers to limit their energy consumption and use backup energy wherever possible as the electric system gets back up to speed. Luma initially attributed the blackout to the failure of an underground cable, but said on Thursday the cause was still under investigation.

The island-wide blackout, which happened around dawn on Tuesday, threw the New Year's Eve plans of the territory's more than 3 million residents into disarray.

The owner of another restaurant in San Juan, who didn't want to be named, told BI that she lost about a thousand dollars worth of refrigerated items — mostly produce and fish — when the power went out on Tuesday.

Luckily, she said, the restaurant was already closed that day, but because she doesn't have backup generators, she couldn't save her perishable inventory. And her restaurant's margins are already very slim, she said, so it won't be easy to make back that lost money.

Hotels, too, lost money during this week's power outage. Jose Lopez told Business Insider that the small eight-room hotel Villa Herencia, where he works in San Juan, had to refund a few guests who left early during Tuesday's outage.

But, he said, power service has been good since it was restored, and the hotel hasn't experienced any smaller outages.

One café worker in San Juan, who didn't want to be named, said that while his café suffered some losses this week, it was able to continue operating through the blackout thanks to its generator. People from around the neighborhood were able to come in and get food during the outage, he said.

Though some businesses and residences had their power restored by Tuesday afternoon or evening, others had to wait longer. Ryan Pamplin, a 36-year-old business owner, told BI that the power at his house in Dorado took 23 hours to come back on. Once it did, it went out again a few hours later and remained out for most of New Year's Day.

The island's power system has been an issue for a long time

Puerto Rico has for years dealt with a sometimes rickety power system, highlighted in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022.

Tuesday's widespread outage came as the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, has been trying to restructure its debt, which The Associated Press said stood at more than $9 billion.

Puerto Rico's new governor, Jenniffer González Colón, who was sworn in on Thursday, has called out the territory's ailing power grid and promised that stabilizing it will be her top priority.

• Ryan Pamplin moved to Puerto Rico four years ago for the entrepreneurial scene.
• He and his family love the island, but he's frustrated with its ailing power infrastructure.
• A massive blackout plunged the island into darkness on Tuesday, and it could take days to restore.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ryan Pamplin, a 36-year-old who moved to Puerto Rico from the mainland US four years ago. Pamplin is the founder and CEO of BlendJet, a brand of portable blenders sold online and in more than 30,000 retail stores in 40 countries. He lives in Dorado with his wife and infant.

Pamplin was affected by Tuesday's near-total blackout in Puerto Rico, which left millions of residents across the island without power. Officials have said it could take days to restore service.

In recent years, Puerto Rico has seen a rise in entrepreneurs moving there. Government incentives like tax breaks — combined with the draw of an island lifestyle — have made it an attractive place for startups and new businesses.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm originally from Santa Monica, California, and then I moved a couple different times. I lived in New York, I lived in Florida, and most recently in the San Francisco Bay area.

And then about four years ago, a good friend of mine who's a really successful entrepreneur just said, "Hey, you got to check out Puerto Rico. There's something really interesting happening here. There's a lot of entrepreneurs moving there."

And I ended up talking to 30 different people — on Zoom, during COVID — who have moved here. Then I planned a whole trip to Puerto Rico with my cofounder and our wives, and we fell in love with it.

We met locals, we met people who had relocated here, and we just felt like, "Wow, what a cool place to go during Covid." And then we just never left. We ended up having our son here and built a house here.

We are in Dorado, which is about 30 minutes to the west of San Juan, and there's a really big community of people who have relocated from the mainland, a lot of entrepreneurs. It's a good mixture of us and locals all mixed together. I have a son who's 19 months old, and there are just tons of other kids to play with all the time. You see kids ride around on bikes by themselves. It's really safe.

The community is amazing and it's a great place to live — aside from the infrastructure.

I've never been anywhere in the world where people are so passionate about electricity that they protest in the streets about it.

When we moved here, there would be people driving tons of cars, just like a parade, with all kinds of megaphones and noisemakers and honking to protest the power company because it's really unreliable and it's expensive. That's happened many times since we've lived here.

People are mad because they keep increasing the rates but the service doesn't improve.

Backup power is a necessity — if you can swing it

You need backup energy in Puerto Rico because we have outages constantly, so I have four portable power stations and two backup batteries. In a two-week period recently, we experienced 14 outages. Most of the time it's an entire city or multiple cities. Sometimes the outages are short, but generally they last five-plus hours, and sometimes they last 18 to 24 hours.

That's a problem for so many people, and for restaurants and local businesses, because the food in their fridge goes bad. And ice sells out super quickly.

And it's not just power loss. Sometimes you get weird voltage drops, so then it fries all your electronics. You might not even be able to get it fixed, you just have to buy a new one. That happens so frequently. It's happened to me. It's happened to all my friends.

And then the gas generators break too. These generators are terrible environmentally — they're burning all this fuel, and they're super inefficient. It's terrible for the air quality surrounding your home.

The really difficult thing is it's really hot here all the time so not having AC could be deadly.

I don't have enough battery backup for the ACs, so when the power goes off, I usually wake up in the middle of the night because I get hot. And then I put a fan next to our bed. Then we sneak into the baby's room, trying not wake him up, and put a fan next to his bed. If we don't, he can't sleep at all without a fan.

Tuesday's power outage is definitely the worst that I've seen in four years of living here. That's because it's not isolated to one city or one area. It's the entire island.

I don't know a single person that has power right now. The only people that have power are people that have generators or they have powerwalls.

I've also never seen the water pressure drop so low. Right now, my water pressure is so bad, not just because my pump is off, but whatever pumps happen at the water company, those pumps aren't working. So if I turn on my faucet, no water comes out.

It's crazy to live in a place that's part of the United States that just has an unbelievably unreliable grid.

You have a lot of really talented people who come here, or are born here, or live here that are just incredibly frustrated because of such a basic thing as not having reliable power. And then they leave, and that hurts the economy.

Making the most of a New Year's Eve with no power

As for New Year's Eve on Tuesday, the power outage will probably inspire everyone to go stand in the street at midnight instead of standing in their homes. People are probably more likely to turn it into a block party and have a really good time.

I'm sure we're going to see all the stars and we're going to see the fireworks.

It'll be beautiful.

(Luma, the privately owned power provider, hasn't responded to a request for comment from Business Insider. The company earlier said in a statement that it's working to track down the source of the outage. "We understand the deep frustration that the power outage situation on a day like today is causing our customers and families in the country," the company said in a translated statement on X.)

• A massive blackout in Puerto Rico left more than 1.3 million power-company customers in the dark.
• The power company, Luma Energy, said restoring power could take up to 48 hours.
• It said the outage appeared to have been caused by the failure of an underground power line.

A massive blackout hit Puerto Rico early Tuesday — and it could take days to restore power.

The outage, which happened around dawn, initially left nearly 90% of the private power company Luma Energy's 1.47 million customers without power, the company told The Associated Press.

Luma, in a statement, called the blackout island-wide. It said the issue appeared to have stemmed from the failure of an underground cable, though it also said the cause was still under investigation. The utility said that fully restoring power could take 24 to 48 hours.

On social media, Luma said it had begun restoring power in phases. The utility said that by 11 a.m. local time it had restored power to the Municipal Hospital of San Juan, among other locations. It said that as of 1 p.m., it had restored power to 44,700 customers, or about 3% of its customers without power. And by 3 p.m., it said it had restored power to more than 73,000 customers.

As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 1.1 million customers remained without power throughout the US island territory.

"Luma teams remain focused on the complex process of restoring service to all affected customers," the company said in a translated statement.

Puerto Rico has for years dealt with a sometimes rickety power system, highlighted in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022.

Luma is in charge of distributing energy across the island, while a company called Genera PR provides the power. The New York Times said both had been under scrutiny because of the territory's frequent outages.

Ryan Pamplin, the CEO and cofounder of BlendJet who's based in Dorado, Puerto Rico, told Business Insider that Tuesday's blackout was "definitely the worst that I've seen in four years of living here."

"I've never seen — even during a hurricane — I've never seen the entire island lose power," he said.

Pamplin said power wasn't the only problem during a blackout. He said water pressure in Puerto Rico is typically low, and pumps are used to help increase it — but when the power goes out, so do the pumps. He said he'd never seen the water pressure in Dorado drop so low.

He said that there was no water coming out of his faucets on Tuesday and that only one of his toilets was sort of flushing.

In a statement posted on Facebook, translated by the Times, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said, "We are demanding answers."

He said the two power companies "must expedite the restart of the generating units outside the fault area and keep the people duly informed about the measures they are taking to restore service throughout the island."

The widespread outage comes as the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, has been trying to restructure its debt, which the AP said stood at more than $9 billion.

Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, argued on X that the federal government needed to step up and "end this cycle of insanity" as the island grapples with its unreliable electric grid.

A report from the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the City University of New York said more than 1.1 million Puerto Ricans lived in the New York metropolitan area in 2022.

Pablo José Hernández Rivera, the incoming resident commissioner of Puerto Rico — the territory's nonvoting member of the House of Representatives — said in a statement that he'd alerted federal officials to the urgency of Tuesday's situation.

"Once sworn in, I will collaborate closely with Congressional leaders and the incoming administrations in Puerto Rico and the United States to deliver real, lasting solutions," he said. "Our people deserve reliable energy and a brighter future — we will not settle for less."

The governor-elect of Puerto Rico, Jenniffer González, who's set to be sworn in on Thursday, also highlighted the territory's ailing power grid on social media.

"We can't keep relying on an energy system that fails our people," González said on X. "Today's blackout and the uncertainty around restoration continue to impact our economy and quality of life."

She said that stabilizing Puerto Rico's energy grid would be her top priority when she takes office.