WIDESPREAD blackouts rolled across Jamaica on Tuesday, cutting off about 95,000 customers, after a technical failure at a critical liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility triggered a cascade of generation losses, exposing a deficit in reliable back-up power and stoking a blame game between the utility and independent power producers (IPPs).

The island’s sole distributor, Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), said the outages began after a problem arose at the Excelerate Energy LNG facility that supplies gas to several major power plants. Excelerate Energy acquired New Fortress Energy’s business in Jamaica for US$1.055 billion in cash earlier this year.

“A technical issue that has developed at the LNG facility has interrupted the supply of fuel to the plants,” JPS said in a statement Tuesday, identifying the Jamalco and South Jamaica power plants as being immediately impacted. Both plants generate about 300 megawatts of electricity. The situation was worsened, the company added, by “the unavailability of renewables and several generating units operated by independent power producers (IPPs)”.

Excelerate Energy, the operator of the LNG facility, could not be reached for comment to explain the nature or duration of the technical issue. Excelerate Energy sells LNG to the JPS for its Bogue plant in St James, South Jamaica Power in St Catherine, and the plant that supplies energy to the Jamalco alumina refinery in Clarendon. The plants generate more than 400 megawatts of electricity. It also sells to several corporate entities that have left the grid and installed LNG plants in the last few years.

“If you cut off gas to all of these power plants, you have what you have today,” Dr Wayne McKenzie, president and CEO of Jamaica Energy Partners (JEP), the country’s largest IPP, told the Jamaica Observer Tuesday.

Responding further about his own company’s capacity issues, he told the Business Observer: “So the real situation is this. One of our plants, JPPC, which is a 60 megawatt HFO plant, is undergoing maintenance….We also have another unit at West Kingston, which is 12 megawatts also undergoing maintenance…I can’t stop my maintenance and bring them back online now. It is a maintenance that we’re doing.”

Altogether, McKenzie said JEP has “about five units out under maintenance”. He estimates that together with the lost capacity due to the gas shortage and planned maintenance at his own company, close to 300 megawatts of capacity was suddenly absent from a grid that requires a significant buffer to handle peak demand of around 550MW.

“So there is indeed a shortfall of generating capacity to meet the demand that we have. Fortunately though, JPS has gotten back gas supply.”

His comments revealed a deeper, systemic vulnerability: the lack of grid-scale battery storage. While Jamaica has rapidly added solar and wind power, these sources are intermittent and, without storage, cannot be relied upon during a crisis. Jamaica targets generating 50 per cent of electricity from renewables by 2030, with sources such as solar and wind accounting for 12.5 per cent of the country’s energy mix as of May 2025.

“Renewables are intermittent power supply. They don’t have battery as a back-up,” McKenzie stated, noting that JEP’s own renewable plants, BMR and Eight Rivers, lack storage. “JPS is supposed to put on 171 megawatts of battery, but it’s nowhere doing so, they have not started as yet.” Efforts to ascertain when the JPS would be making the investment in additional battery storage proved futile.

McKenzie argued that the incident proves the grid is becoming less secure as it adds more renewables without the necessary infrastructure to support them. “The country still needs to have a thermal backbone,” he said. “You can’t inundate the grid with renewables unless you have batteries in place.”

However, JPS pointedly noted that the IPPs’ issues began before the LNG crisis. “We have been assured by the IPPs that they are working to address the issues that resulted in the unavailability of some of their units even before the technical issue that developed on Excelerate Energy’s LNG facility today,” the utility said.

JPS said it worked with the fuel supplier and IPPs to restore power and apologised to customers for the inconvenience. All of JEP’s idled units are expected to return to the grid by mid-October.

MCKENZIE…there is indeed a shortfall of generating capacity to meet the demand that we have.