San Juan, Sept. 21 (BUS): Nearly 80% of Puerto Rican homes and businesses still lacked electricity Tuesday as rains from Hurricane Fiona receded, leaving residents complaining that the island’s troubled electrical grid was still in disarray before storm. Billions of dollars in funding to improve it.
Energy provider LUMA Energy said it has restored service to more than 100,000 customers and crews are still working on restoring power to others, Reuters reports.
Fiona hit Puerto Rico on Sunday, causing an island-wide outage for its 1.5 million customers.
“Full restoration may take several days,” the company said.
The Puerto Rican network has long been criticized as unreliable, but residents have complained that outages have become more frequent since LUMA took over operations last year.
Residents interviewed were not surprised that the network was vulnerable to a less severe storm than Hurricane Maria in 2017, when it took more than 11 months to fully restore power.
The network is largely owned by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA).
Analysts said the storm damaged transmission lines more than power plants, and the restoration process will depend on the restarting of those lines.
“We had a terrible experience in Maria’s wake,” said Ramon Luis Neves, a San Juan attorney, who had no authority over his apartment. They promised it would be better.
In July, protesters marched in San Juan, demanding changes after multiple price increases and ongoing power outages.
LUMA, a joint venture between units of Canadian energy company ATCO Ltd (50%) and US energy contractor Quanta Services Inc (PWR.N) (50%), acquired the island’s electrical grid operations last year.
In testimony dated September 12, LUMA officials told a US House of Representatives committee that in the 15 months since the company acquired the Puerto Rico network, the company has reduced its average customer outages to 7.6 in a year from 10.6 when PREPA operated the system.
LUMA also said it has restored 43 miles (69 km) of transmission lines and reactivated five substations that have been out of service since Hurricane Maria.
“With the change from PREPA to LUMA, the most I’ve seen is that the frequency of time I am without electricity is greater,” said Mario Allegri, a San Juan-based film contractor. To run his computer and other essential work equipment in the event of a power outage.
Adam Jordan, an analyst with Energy Research Envirus, said FEMA figures show about $20 billion of the $65 billion allocated to Puerto Rico after Maria spending.
“In the aftermath of Maria, blackouts and blackouts have become common across most of the island. This has left Puerto Rico very vulnerable to storms much weaker than Maria,” he said.
Allegri said it has been difficult to report a service outage and receive calls about restoring service from LUMA.
A study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that service recovery times and voltage fluctuations increased after privatization due largely to a shortage of experienced workers.
Poweroutages.com, which estimates the outage based on data from utilities, said early Tuesday afternoon that 1.168 million customers remained without service, citing what it said was limited information available from LUMA. Poweroutages.com estimates that there are 1.468 million energy customers in Puerto Rico.