Cozumel's new undersea power cable is awarded, with work set to start October 5

Cozumel's electricity reaches the island through a submarine line laid around forty years ago, and on September 15 the federal tender to replace it was finally decided. Work is due to begin on October 5, about 20 kilometers of new cable at an estimated 3.6 billion pesos, and the timing matters more than the money: four years ago the state was already warning that the old line had reached the end of its life.

The announcement came from Governor Mara Lezama on September 17, during her weekly La Voz del Pueblo broadcast. The money is from the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE), Mexico's state power utility, through a federally tendered contract; the governor described the investment as federal and the project as the answer to "a historic need" of the island. For a place that lives on cruise passengers, divers and the hotels that serve them, a reliable power supply is not a detail. It is the floor everything else stands on.

October 2022: the warning

The project did not start this year. On October 24, 2022, the governor met the then director of CFE, Manuel Bartlett Díaz, in Mexico City to ask for new submarine cables for Cozumel and for Holbox. The state's own bulletin from that meeting is blunt. Cozumel's existing duct network "has practically completed its useful life," it said, "and operates at maximum." Lezama warned that "if this is not addressed, there could be serious disruptions to the electricity supply across the whole island," and the bulletin added that, on projections, the current transmission link to the island would not be enough to cover peak demand.

The same document describes how the island is fed. Cozumel's internal network runs on two radial 34.5 kV circuits that leave from the CFE substation in Playa del Carmen, and a gas-turbine plant on the island can supply part of the demand in an emergency, including a failure of the submarine cable. The project sketched then was roughly 25 kilometers of 115 kV submarine and underground power cable, plus about 2.5 kilometers of underground cable.

September 2026: the award

Almost four years later, the tender has been decided. According to the governor, the project first failed to be awarded because specialists judged that it needed changes to meet Cozumel's current and future demand in full, and it went through only after she took it to President Claudia Sheinbaum, the energy secretary Luz Elena González Escobar and CFE's director general Emilia Esther Calleja Alor. "It is worth managing, it is worth knocking on doors," Lezama said. The ruling on the tender was issued on September 15.

The work now described covers about 20 kilometers of submarine cable, together with an underground transmission section between the mainland and the island, replacing a line the state says has been linked to wear and to failures in the island's supply. The governor put the build at about a year and a half, finishing in 2028, and Riviera Maya News reported that the winning contractor has until February 2028 to complete it. Cozumel's mayor, José Luis Chacón Méndez, called it "a strategic project that our island needs and that has been a demand of Cozumel residents for many years."

What this does and does not settle

It does not fix anything yet. The new cable is a 2028 piece of infrastructure, and until it is energized the island runs on the line the state described in 2022 as operating at its limit, with the gas-turbine plant as the backstop. The state bulletin did not name the contractor, but later reporting did. Novedades (Sipse) reported on September 27 that the contract for the line, formally the "LT Corriente Alterna Submarina Playacar-Chankanaab II", went to a consortium led by China's Zhongtian Technology Submarine Cable with the Mexican firms Entia de México and Cables Subterráneos, for 3,563,683,589 pesos, with a completion deadline of February 26, 2028. No voltage or capacity has been published for the new line, only that it will match the island's current conditions and projected needs. The 2026 figure of about 20 kilometers is also shorter than the 25 sketched in 2022, which fits the governor's account of a redesigned project but is not explained. The headline figures come from the state government and the mayor, with the contract details from press reporting of the award; we could not find a public statement from CFE itself.

What it does mean is that a long-requested repair now has a contract, a start date and a deadline, which is more than it had at any point since 2022. For anyone who owns, rents out or is building on Cozumel, power reliability is one of the practical questions worth asking about any property on the island, and from October that question has a dated answer. It sits alongside the island's other recent planning news: in September we covered the final rejection of Cozumel's fourth cruise pier, and earlier the proposal to halve VAT on Cozumel, Isla Mujeres and Holbox. For homes and land currently listed on the island, see our Cozumel location page.

Sources: Coordinación General de Comunicación, Gobierno de Quintana Roo, bulletins of September 17, 2026 (Cancún) and October 24, 2022 (Mexico City); Riviera Maya News, September 18, 2026; Novedades Quintana Roo (Sipse), September 27, 2026.