Luma Energy, the company in charge of Puerto Rico's power transmission and distribution system, said on Friday that the islandwide blackout on New Year's Eve was due to the failure in an underground cable that had long been out of order.
Juan Rodríguez, vice president of capital projects at Luma Energy, said that the cable is so old the company that manufactured it closed its doors 25 years ago, Puerto Rican national newspaper El Nuevo Día reported. He added that they are still investigating how exactly that cable triggered the blackout.
Half of Puerto Rico remained in the dark on New Year's Day, drawing frustration and ire from residents as it coincided with a new increase in the price of electricity attributed to rising fuel costs.
Puerto Ricans, who already pay twice as much for electricity as those in the U.S. mainland, are now paying more for unreliable service provided by an antiquated and patched-up electrical grid.
The grid has not been permanently rebuilt since Hurricane Maria decimated it in 2017. It remains flimsy and prone to breakdowns as outdated fossil fuel plants continue working way past their lifespan to power the grid, and distribution cables fail to transmit electricity. These have caused power outages to become longer and more recurrent.
It took 40 years to build the grid Hurricane Maria destroyed in one day, 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 40 more years to fix it, but the magnitude of the work we have to do is huge."
In 2022, exactly five years after Maria, Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Fiona. Since then, more than 200 outages have been reported in the U.S. territory due to lack of systems that provide backup energy when the grid fails, according to exiting U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
"Band-Aid solutions aren't going to cut it," Granholm said in a news conference in Puerto Rico Friday morning. "Progress is being made and more progress needs to be made."
Even though much of the work ahead will fall on the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, Granholm said that under President Joe Biden, "the ground has been set" to improve Puerto Rico's grid and transition to renewable energy.
Most of the funds allocated to rebuild the electrical grid, about $17 billion, are coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A little over a third of that money, about $6 billion, has been designated to than 200 projects to improve the grid. At least 125 of those are already under construction in partnership with Luma Energy and Genera PR, the private company in charge of power generation, Granholm said.
The secretary said her office assisted Puerto Rico in its race to comply with local policies that seek to achieve 100% renewable electricity by 2050. Under the Biden administration, Puerto Rico increased its capacity to generate power from renewable energy from less than 4% to 6%.
But great challenges remain ahead as officials in Puerto Rico struggle to simultaneously coordinate short-term repairs to stabilize power services with the grid's long-term reconstruction and a transition to renewable energy sources.
New Puerto Rico Gov. Jenniffer González campaigned on the promise to fix the issue that has been plaguing the U.S. territory. In one of her 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 Partnerships Authority, Colón will serve as the point person in charge of coordinating herculean efforts to improve and rebuild the power grid.
Marxuach, the think tank director, pointed out that it's still unclear what kind of budget and resources will be provided to Colón.
Stabilizing the grid and reducing the number of outages in the short-term should still be the top priority, Marxuach said. For this, additional sources of energy need to be added to the grid. Genera PR and Luma Energy plan to install more electric backup units to provide temporary power when the grid fails. They also plan on installing new electrical transformers, as well as repairing several substations in the next 18 months.
Granholm said the Department of Energy "added 350 megawatts of temporary generation to provide additional backups, but we need to do more.”
Ultimately, the grid needs to be fully reconstructed for Puerto Rico to have reliable power in the long term. That process started under Trump's first presidential term. The administration then notoriously blocked Puerto Rico from receiving aid and implemented additional requirements that slowed down the disbursement of reconstruction funds. It remains to be seen if any of these practices will be brought back after Trump takes office for a second time.
A combination of a multitude of factors, Marxuach said, "have converged so that we will continue, in 2025, to have a system that is still fragile."
