Borinquen Made2026-07-23 · Economy and politics
Genera PR admits yesterday's outage was its own operational error
On July 23, 2026, NotiCel reports that Genera PR spokesman Iván Báez acknowledged on Radio Isla that the previous day's outage was related to a Genera fault. It was an operational error, he said. Costa Sur 5 went offline at 5:00 p.m. and earlier an EcoEléctrica unit had gone offline, which came back in the early hours. That combination, according to the note, left more than 200,000 customers without power. They worked fast, he asserts, and at 9:45 p.m. the unit was already in service.
Josué Colón Ortiz, Energy czar and director of the Public-Private Partnerships Authority, asked Genera for a report. Iván Báez says it is his responsibility as director of that authority, that one has to be transparent and show one's face, and that they have faced a week of incidents after a good pace. The prior Thursday, he holds, San Juan 7, San Juan 4, Costa Sur 5, and Costa Sur 6 went offline. The last of those, according to him, failed because of a problem in a switchyard that LUMA has not resolved on a 230,000-kilovolt line.
Iván Báez insists that LUMA has to do its work on that line. Costa Sur 6 remains offline; the hope is that it operates next week. That reading does not fully match the two-week deadline Josué Colón Ortiz gave on July 18 in NotiCel, nor the czar's pointing that Thursday's disturbance was born of operations of the 50400. Two spokespeople, two attributions. A winner is not chosen.
Iván Báez's more than 200,000 are not the 254 thousand of 6:40 p.m. that NotiCel put on the 22nd, nor the 133 thousand of the 21st. Each figure stays on its date. On the 22nd, another piece covered Costa Sur 5's nighttime entry. This July 23 note is the admission. A trip, a shedding, and an assumed fault are three chapters.
Genera speaks; LUMA does not answer in this piece. The reader who wants the radio interview has the NotiCel URL at the foot. This is not original reporting.
Source: NotiCel. https://noticel.com/ultima-hora/20260723/genera-pr-admite-su-responsabilidad-en-el-apagon-de-ayer/