Power restored after more than 22,000 JEA customers experience outage on cold night

Jacksonville, FL — On one of the coldest nights Jacksonville has seen in a long time, more than 22,000 JEA customers were in the dark, some for about 90 minutes.

Several listeners called WOKV to report outages around town. JEA’s outage map showed several clusters of outages, totaling 22,235 customers at the peak, with outages generally first reported around 6 PM. By 7:15 PM, power to the major outage clusters had been restored.

JEA Spokeswoman Gerri Boyce tells WOKV a jumper that connects a substation to the power grid failed. That led to electrical issues at the substation, which ultimately caused a unit to trip and the subsequent “significant” outages.

It’s still unclear why the jumper failed, but JEA is investigating whether the cold and customer demand may have contributed, along with other factors like the equipment itself. Depending on what JEA determines the cause of the jumper failure to be, Boyce says JEA may decide to review similar equipment at other substations, to protect against something like this happening again. Boyce says this is a “rare” occurance, but they worked to get customers back on as quickly as possible.