ST. THOMAS — A total blackout hit St. Thomas and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands early Sunday, the second such outage that weekend. The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority (WAPA) stated that the outages stemmed from the loss of generation at a power plant.
The first blackout occurred late on Saturday, and power was restored overnight before another blackout occurred hours later. WAPA, the territory’s sole electric utility, attributed both outages to failures in power generation rather than transmission issues.
Officials told legislators in April that recurring outages were caused by storms, equipment shortages, weak generation capacity, equipment breakdowns, and years of deferred maintenance. More than half of the territory’s petroleum-fueled generating units are more than 25 years old, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017 damaged or destroyed up to 90% of the U.S. Virgin Islands’ transmission and distribution systems, according to the EIA. Since then, rebuilding efforts have faced persistent challenges, including aging infrastructure and limited investment in modernization.
Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. has pledged to fix the power issues and has invested approximately $100 million in federal funding into the utility in recent years. As part of ongoing mitigation efforts, WAPA expects to install temporary generation and extra battery energy storage at a main power plant in the upcoming months to help reduce outages.
The U.S. Virgin Islands relies heavily on petroleum for electricity generation, with renewable energy sources representing about 3% of the territory’s power generating capacity, per the EIA. The average price of electricity in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2024 was about 33 cents per kilowatt hour, approximately twice the U.S. average of 16 cents.