So the folks down there got hammered by a hurricane (again) and most of island lost power (again).
How is it the energy provider there has not rebuilt their grid in a robust manner?
Is it physically impossible? Are they being cheap in their outlay?
Building it once in a hardened fashion has to be cheaper than rebuilding it over and over again.
Anyone have any knowledge about this?
Well, there is that little detail that after throwing paper towels to Puerto Ricans after the hurricane, Trump and his administration made sure Puerto Rico wouldn’t get financial aid to recover from the hurricane.
This Bloomberg article notes a number of issues:
Also, after Hurricane Maria destroyed major parts of the electricity distribution network in September 2017, the decision was made by then governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló, to privatize the electrical utility which was formerly the Commonwealth-run Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. In 2020 the franchise was contracted to LUMA Energy, a purpose-created entity to provide all services as ‘reduced cost’. It has not gone well to say the least.
Wikipedia has a decent summary:
Stranger
If it takes 20 years to build out the replacement hardened grid, what happens when every 5 years a bunch of your existing grid is destroyed … again. Same thing applies to local power distribution in PR and the rest of the USA.
You (the customers) need to pay for routine repairs, post-disaster repairs, capacity upgrades, and incremental hardening. Most customers opt to forego that last very expensive step. So the utility regulators follow the customer’s desires.
And that’s all before we get into the usual rapacious crony capitalism and regulatory capture.
I’ve lived in places where they systematically replace damaged infrastructure with hardened. Of course some of the damaged stuff that didn’t get hardened can and does get redamaged. But eventually it all gets hardened. From what I’m reading, they never even start hardening anything, just hurry up and do the same thing over and over again. This is why I hate privatization of essential services. The stockholders come first. Service be damned.
factor in that in regions like LatAm/Caribbean a non-trivial percentage of clients are “colgados” … (freeriders, illegally conected to the overhead cable salads).
Also, a huge problem is that cables are being run, but never actively retired if no longer needed:
obv. the higher the cable load, the higher the chances of a falling tree catching on and downing the whole post and leaving all other cables w/out energy (often for safety reasons)
If the majority of the electrical system’s customers are poor, the money just isn’t there (short of government subsidies) to upgrade much beyond a third-world standard. In the continental USA industrial customers are the big driver of the power grid; how much industry is in Puerto Rico to be able to demand and pay for a reliable power grid?
I have heard one issue is taxation. There is no state tax (since PR is not a state) and they pay few Federal taxes so there is an attitude of “Why should we give them money if they don’t pay into the system.” I don’t know if that is actually true or not.
I don’t know if it is the case there, but a lot of the time these privatized companies just suck whatever money they can, run the system into the ground with minimal repairs, and rely on the government to come and bail out an essential service when an outlier event happens. After all, privatized or not, the government cannot stand idly by and say “not my problem” about an essential service.
There are still Commonwealth taxes.