Luma Energy, the company in charge of Puerto Rico’s electricity transmission and distribution system, said Friday that the Island-wide power outage on New Year’s Eve was due to the failure of an underground cable that had long been out of service.
Juan Rodríguez, vice president of capital projects at Luma Energy, said the cable is so old that the company that manufactured it closed its doors 25 years ago, the Puerto Rican national newspaper reports. El Nuevo Día reported. He added that they are still investigating how exactly that cable triggered the power outage.
Half of Puerto Rico remained in the dark on New Year’s Day, sparking frustration and anger among residents as it coincided with a new increase in the price of electricity attributed to rising fuel prices.
Puerto Ricans, who I’m already paying twice as much for electricity, like those on the American continent, now pay more for unreliable service provided by an obsolete and patched-up electricity network.
The grid has not been permanently rebuilt since Hurricane Maria decimated it in 2017. It remains fragile and prone to outages as obsolete fossil fuel plants continue to operate well beyond their useful life. life to power the grid and distribution cables fail to transmit electricity. These caused power outages become longer and more recurring.
It took 40 years to build the network destroyed in one day by Hurricane Maria, Sergio Marxuach, policy director of the Puerto Rico-based think tank Center For A New Economy, told NBC News. “I’m not saying it will take another 40 years to fix it, but the scale of the work we need to do is enormous.”
In 2022, exactly five years after MariaPuerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Fiona. Since then, more than 200 outages have been reported across the U.S. due to a lack of systems providing backup power in the event of a grid outage, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
“Band-stop solutions will not be enough,” Granholm said at a news conference in Puerto Rico Friday morning. “Progress is being made and more progress needs to be made.”
Although much of the work ahead will fall to President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration, Granholm said that under President Joe Biden, “the ground has been laid” to improve Puerto Rico’s grid and energy transition. renewable.
Most of the money allocated to rebuilding the power grid, about $17 billion, comes from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Just over a third of that money, or about $6 billion, was allocated to more than 200 projects aimed at improving the grid. At least 125 of them are already under construction in partnership with Luma Energy And RP genresthe private company responsible for generating electricity, Granholm said.
The secretary said her office has helped Puerto Rico in its race to comply with local policies who seek to achieve 100% renewable electricity by 2050. Under the Biden administration, Puerto Rico has increased its capacity to generate electricity from renewable energy from less than 4% has 6%.
But big challenges remain as Puerto Rico officials work to simultaneously coordinate short-term repairs aimed at stabilizing electric services with long-term rebuilding of the grid and a transition to renewable energy sources.
New Puerto Rico Governor Jennifer González campaigned on the promise of solving the problem plaguing the American territory. In one of his first acts in office, González named engineer Josué Colón as the new “energy czar.” While also serving as director of the Puerto Rico Public-Private Partnership Authority, Colón will be the person responsible for coordinating the herculean efforts to improve and rebuild the power grid.
Marxuach, director of the think tank, stressed that it is still unclear what kind of budget and resources will be given to Colón.
Stabilizing the grid and reducing the number of outages in the short term should remain the top priority, Marxuach said. For this, additional energy sources must be added to the network. Genera PR and Luma Energy plan to install more emergency power units to provide temporary power in the event of a grid outage. They also plan to install new electrical transformers and repair several substations over the next 18 months.
Granholm said the Energy Department “added 350 megawatts of temporary generation to provide additional backups, but we need to do more.”
Ultimately, the grid must be completely rebuilt so that Puerto Rico can have long-term reliable electricity. This process began during Trump’s first presidential term. The administration then notoriously blocked Puerto Rico from receiving aid and implemented additional requirements that slowed the disbursement of reconstruction funds. It remains to be seen whether any of these practices will be reinstated after Trump takes office for a second time.
A combination of a multitude of factors, Marxuach said, “converged so that we continue, in 2025, to have a still fragile system.”
