- Ryan Pamplin moved to Puerto Rico four years ago for the entrepreneurial scene.
- He and his family love the island, but he’s frustrated with its ailing power infrastructure.
- A massive blackout plunged the island into darkness on Tuesday, and it could take days to restore.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ryan Pamplin, a 36-year-old who moved to Puerto Rico from the mainland US four years ago. Pamplin is the founder and CEO of BlendJet, a brand of portable blenders sold online and in more than 30,000 retail stores in 40 countries. He lives in Dorado with his wife and infant.
Pamplin was affected by Tuesday’s near-total blackout in Puerto Rico, which left millions of residents across the island without power. Officials have said it could take days to restore service.
In recent years, Puerto Rico has seen a rise in entrepreneurs moving there. Government incentives like tax breaks — combined with the draw of an island lifestyle — have made it an attractive place for startups and new businesses.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m originally from Santa Monica, California, and then I moved a couple different times. I lived in New York, I lived in Florida, and most recently in the San Francisco Bay area.
And then about four years ago, a good friend of mine who’s a really successful entrepreneur just said, “Hey, you got to check out Puerto Rico. There’s something really interesting happening here. There’s a lot of entrepreneurs moving there.”
And I ended up talking to 30 different people — on Zoom, during COVID — who have moved here. Then I planned a whole trip to Puerto Rico with my cofounder and our wives, and we fell in love with it.
We met locals, we met people who had relocated here, and we just felt like, “Wow, what a cool place to go during Covid.” And then we just never left. We ended up having our son here and built a house here.
We are in Dorado, which is about 30 minutes to the west of San Juan, and there’s a really big community of people who have relocated from the mainland, a lot of entrepreneurs. It’s a good mixture of us and locals all mixed together. I have a son who’s 19 months old, and there are just tons of other kids to play with all the time. You see kids ride around on bikes by themselves. It’s really safe.
Ryan Pamplin
The community is amazing and it’s a great place to live — aside from the infrastructure.
I’ve never been anywhere in the world where people are so passionate about electricity that they protest in the streets about it.
When we moved here, there would be people driving tons of cars, just like a parade, with all kinds of megaphones and noisemakers and honking to protest the power company because it’s really unreliable and it’s expensive. That’s happened many times since we’ve lived here.
People are mad because they keep increasing the rates but the service doesn’t improve.
Backup power is a necessity — if you can swing it
You need backup energy in Puerto Rico because we have outages constantly, so I have four portable power stations and two backup batteries. In a two-week period recently, we experienced 14 outages. Most of the time it’s an entire city or multiple cities. Sometimes the outages are short, but generally they last five-plus hours, and sometimes they last 18 to 24 hours.
That’s a problem for so many people, and for restaurants and local businesses, because the food in their fridge goes bad. And ice sells out super quickly.
And it’s not just power loss. Sometimes you get weird voltage drops, so then it fries all your electronics. You might not even be able to get it fixed, you just have to buy a new one. That happens so frequently. It’s happened to me. It’s happened to all my friends.
RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP via Getty Images
And then the gas generators break too. These generators are terrible environmentally — they’re burning all this fuel, and they’re super inefficient. It’s terrible for the air quality surrounding your home.
The really difficult thing is it’s really hot here all the time so not having AC could be deadly.
I don’t have enough battery backup for the ACs, so when the power goes off, I usually wake up in the middle of the night because I get hot. And then I put a fan next to our bed. Then we sneak into the baby’s room, trying not wake him up, and put a fan next to his bed. If we don’t, he can’t sleep at all without a fan.
Tuesday’s power outage is definitely the worst that I’ve seen in four years of living here. That’s because it’s not isolated to one city or one area. It’s the entire island.
I don’t know a single person that has power right now. The only people that have power are people that have generators or they have powerwalls.
I’ve also never seen the water pressure drop so low. Right now, my water pressure is so bad, not just because my pump is off, but whatever pumps happen at the water company, those pumps aren’t working. So if I turn on my faucet, no water comes out.
It’s crazy to live in a place that’s part of the United States that just has an unbelievably unreliable grid.
You have a lot of really talented people who come here, or are born here, or live here that are just incredibly frustrated because of such a basic thing as not having reliable power. And then they leave, and that hurts the economy.
Making the most of a New Year’s Eve with no power
As for New Year’s Eve on Tuesday, the power outage will probably inspire everyone to go stand in the street at midnight instead of standing in their homes. People are probably more likely to turn it into a block party and have a really good time.
I’m sure we’re going to see all the stars and we’re going to see the fireworks.
It’ll be beautiful.
(Luma, the privately owned power provider, hasn’t responded to a request for comment from Business Insider. The company earlier said in a statement that it’s working to track down the source of the outage. “We understand the deep frustration that the power outage situation on a day like today is causing our customers and families in the country,” the company said in a translated statement on X.)
