Jamaica’s latest nationwide power outage, which left the entire island without electricity last Friday, stems from the same core grid vulnerabilities that have triggered at least three major system collapses over the past 20 years, according to a preliminary investigation from the country’s sole electricity provider Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS).
The preliminary report, delivered to Jamaica’s Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) on Tuesday and reviewed by Jamaica Observer, has not yet drawn a public response from the regulatory body. But Energy Minister Daryl Vaz has publicly expressed fierce frustration over the repeat failure, noting that clear directives were issued to JPS years ago to prevent such incidents from happening again.
Vaz confirmed, “Even as a preliminary document, the report makes clear this is the same category of system failure we have seen stretching back to the first major outage in 2006. Now, 20 years later, amid an era of rapid technological advancement, we are still grappling with identical system failures. This is totally unacceptable.”
To address the long-running issue once and for all, Vaz announced the government will commission an independent third-party consultant to conduct a full review of JPS’ final report, which is expected to be released 30 days after the outage. All past OUR recommendations designed to prevent grid collapse that could lead to nationwide blackouts will also be re-examined, the minister added. “The Jamaican public has grown fed up with repeated outages from the same underlying issues, and I share that frustration completely,” Vaz said.
The minister pointed to the August 2012 islandwide blackout as a clear parallel. That outage was sparked when lightning struck a transmission pole along the Duhaney to Naggo Head 69 kilovolt (kV) line as Tropical Storm Ernesto passed near Jamaica. In its post-incident analysis, OUR noted the 2012 outage aligned perfectly with the patterns that caused three prior shutdowns dating back to 2006. The 2012 investigation cited a combination of contributing factors: human error, inadequate maintenance, and long-running deficiencies in both the national transmission grid and power generation infrastructure. The absence of a functioning protection relay was identified as the primary trigger that led to a full system collapse in 2012.
This year’s outage follows an almost identical trajectory, JPS’s preliminary report finds. The incident began with multiple overlapping faults on critical 69kV infrastructure in Jamaica’s Corporate Area. First, two lightning-induced faults struck the Rockfort Substation and the connected Hunts Bay–Rockfort 69kV transmission line. A subsequent phase-to-ground fault developed on the nearby Hunts Bay–Port Authority 69kV line.
On-site physical inspections carried out by JPS confirmed three key hardware issues: a damaged insulator at position 41 along the Hunts Bay–Rockfort line, a flashover at the Rockfort 69kV substation’s disconnect switch, and a broken conductor on the Hunts Bay–Port Authority line. JPS reports that its protective relays correctly detected the initial electrical disturbance and triggered automatic shutoffs at multiple substations, including Greenwich Road, Duhaney, Rockfort, Hunt’s Bay, and the Port Authority substation.
However, JPS’s analysis found that the primary protection scheme at the Hunt’s Bay substation for the Rockfort line either failed entirely or operated with a critical delay. This extended the duration of the fault, allowed the disturbance to escalate, and spread system instability across the grid through unplanned remote tripping. Sequence of event (SOE) data shows that the shutdown of Jamaica Private Power Company Unit 1 triggered a cascading loss of additional generating capacity at the Hunts Bay plant, West Kingston Power Plant, and other facilities across the national system.
The sudden, large-scale loss of generation created a severe imbalance between power supply and consumer demand, which activated all five stages of the grid’s automatic under-frequency load shedding (UFLS) system. “Even with these protective schemes activated, the scale and speed of generation outstripped the grid’s ability to re-stabilize,” the report explained. The imbalance led to successive shutdowns of both JPS-owned and independent private power generators, eventually resulting in a full shutdown of the interconnected national grid and the all-island outage.
In the aftermath of the collapse, JPS activated its emergency incident command structure and began restoration work using a controlled black-start and incremental system build-up process, starting with isolating the damaged Corporate Area infrastructure. Restoration proceeded by establishing separate stable power islands before gradually reconnected regions to the main grid.
JPS has already begun implementing interim measures to stabilize the grid and reduce the risk of another outage. These include ongoing detailed analysis of relay operations and sequence of event data from all affected substations, as well as a full review and validation of all line protection schemes, with specific attention to the high-risk Hunts Bay–Rockfort corridor.