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Puerto Rico is Experiencing an Island-Wide Blackout (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Seven months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico, the power grid is still unstable. But progress was being made; according to CBS, less than 10 percent of the island was without power as of a month ago. But now, the Associated Press reports that the island is undergoing yet another full blackout. The power company is still investigating the cause and estimates it will take 24 to 36 hours for power to be restored. The saga of Puerto Rico's power grid has been an unhappy one. The US territory was already facing a financial crisis before the hurricane hit. The island only has one electric company, and prior to Maria, it was $9 billion in debt and utilizing outdated infrastructure and equipment.
Why is investing in Hydro bad? Its a very stable baseload generator for the power grid. The main problem is getting the power over the transmission lines to where it is needed. This was a problem with the 50-60 year old tech probably in place but it's not as much of an issue with current tech and equipment. This means the transmission and distribution circuits need to be upgraded and that costs money. They also have to upgrade the substation equipment to bring in redundancy, allow for better power protection, and better regulate the voltage coming from the substation as well as the voltages on the individual branch lines of each circuit. Spending on infrastructure upgrades is not only a good idea, its necessary.
Please stop with idiotic comments about "the left" or "the right," and what they may or may not know. There are smart people across the spectrum, and it doesn't help discussion to denigrate broad, unspecific groups of people. Interest rates being tied to risk is pretty darn basic.
PREPA's has deferred maintenance on their power plants for so long that it would be very expensive to rehabilitate many of them into anything resembling a reliable condition. They have turbine rotors that have been sitting outside rusting for years. Even if they gave me a power plant for free, I wouldn't want to attempt to turn it into a profitable enterprise. Plus, since they have burned many power plant repair companies so badly, most will not work for PREPA until past bills are paid AND new work is paid in advance.
Source- PREPA owes my company a large sum of money for power plant work done before the hurricanes.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.