Blackout hits U.S. Virgin Islands for second time this weekend
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- A second islandwide blackout this weekend left St. Thomas and St. John in the dark Sunday, spotlighting the U.S. Virgin Islands’ increasingly fragile power grid.
- Despite more than $100 million in federal investment, the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority continues to struggle with aging generators, equipment shortages and years of deferred maintenance.
- Residents already paying about twice the U.S. average for electricity now endure routine outages, while renewable energy supplies just 3% of power as officials rush to add temporary generation.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A total blackout hit St. Thomas and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands early Sunday, the second this weekend as the U.S. territory struggles with increasingly frequent outages.
The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority said in a statement that the outages stemmed from the loss of generation at a power plant. The first blackout hit late Saturday, and despite crews restoring power overnight, another blackout hit hours later.
More than 42,000 people live on St. Thomas, the main island, and nearly 4,000 live on St. John.
Outages have become increasingly common across the U.S. territory, and frustrations boiled over online as people on social media called on the government to restore electricity.
Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. has pledged to fix the issue, investing some $100 million in federal funding into the struggling utility in recent years. But the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority is still struggling to provide service. In April, officials told legislators that the outages were a result of storms, equipment shortages, weak generation capacity, equipment breakdowns and years of deferred maintenance.
More than half of the U.S. territory’s petroleum-fueled generating units are more than 25 years old, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It also noted that hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017 damaged or destroyed up to 90% of the U.S. Virgin Islands’ transmission and distribution systems.
The utility agency has said it expects to install temporary generation and extra battery energy storage at a main power plant in the upcoming months to help reduce the number of outages.
Renewable energy sources represent only about 3% of the U.S. Virgin Islands’ power generating capacity. The average price of electricity in 2024 was about 33 cents per kilowatt hour, about twice as high as the U.S. average of 16 cents, according to the Energy Information Administration.
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