Dominican Republic: Dominican Republic experienced a brief nationwide blackout on 23 February, the second such outage in the past three months, raising fresh concerns about the reliability of the country’s electricity system.
The outage occurred shortly before noon, bringing traffic to a standstill in some areas, disrupting public transport and forcing several businesses to suspend operations while crews worked to restore power.
According to the state-owned Dominican Electricity Transmission Company, the country’s main power plants abruptly stopped supplying electricity, triggering a shutdown of the wider system. By mid-afternoon, power had been partially restored, with the grid operating at close to 30 % of its capacity, Energy Minister Joel Santos said.
Santos explained that essential services, including hospitals, drinking water systems, mass transit and airports, continued to operate using backup power systems during the outage.
He added that the blackout was caused by a trip in a transmission line switch, which automatically pushed the system into protection mode to prevent further damage.
The incident follows a major blackout in November, when a country-wide outage was attributed to human error during maintenance work on a transmission line. Together, the two events have intensified public debate over grid resilience and the need for improved system reliability in the Caribbean nation.
Source: AP News
