US to supply Puerto Rico with emergency power generation

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The U.S. government announced Tuesday that it will provide Puerto Rico with temporary electric generation via barges to help´in restoring the island’s storm-devastated power grid and ease repeated widespread outages.

The move will allow crews to take equipment such as substations, transformers and breakers offline for long-needed repairs that are expected to take anywhere from 12 to 18 months, said Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi. It will also provide a boost to a system whose generation capacity has long been waning.

“We know the grid is in a critical state,” he said. “We cannot endure these outages.”

The move is part of a deal reached last month with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, which agreed to help the U.S. territory stabilize a power system that was razed by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and pummeled again by Hurricane Fiona in September.

Nancy Casper, FEMA federal coordinator, said additional generation of 600 to 700 megawatts will be available in two to three months via barges and temporary land-based generators.

She said the federal government would pay for 90% of the project and Puerto Rico’s government the remaining 10%, but that no estimated cost is yet available because teams will reach out to vendors by the end of November.

The announcement was expected to quell some of the anger and frustration building up across the island of 3.2 million people whose lives have been increasingly disrupted by lengthy power outages.

The latest outage occurred on Monday, leaving 178,000 customers in the dark for reasons unknown. Previous outages have been blamed on exploding transformers, iguanas, sargassum and aging infrastructure.

Puerto Rico’s power grid was already crumbling due to decades of mismanagement and neglect when...