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 The island only has one electric company, and prior to Maria, it was $9 billion in debt and utilizing outdated infrastructure and equipment.

Comments

How is that possible??

[Higaran]

How can any company be so far in debt and still operating, in any shape or form. I would have figured they would have closed long ago and their assets sold to other companies.

Re: How is that possible??

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's so unprofitable to operate there, other companies won't want to buy in just to lose money?

Re:How is that possible??

[tomhath]

PREPA - Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority is a public corporation, not private. One of the benefits of socialized utilities is that they can spend other people's money forever.

Re:How is that possible??

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The government must keep it running regardless of its financial woes. It's not Sears losing to Walmart.

Re: How is that possible??

[HornWumpus]

PREPA is in the process of being sold off.

The modern standard would be to setup an independent system operator (ISO), a transmission operations company, sell each of the generation units separately and dispatch via power bids into a pool.

We'll see what the corrupt government of Puerto Rico does. I bet the whole thing ends up in the hands of contributors, particularly any profitable, low cost, generation stations.

The key problem the power company has is not getting paid for the power they generate, which private enterprise can help fix, not being beholding to voters.

Re: How is that possible??

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor people assuming no one will ever try to reclaim their debts. Local Government has always assumed the US would bail them out, thus the corruption. What you're seeing now is quite calculated, PR to make the US Government look bad. Media will eat it up too.

Never let a tragedy go to waste where profit an be exploited. It's unlikely _any_ of these fuckers will spend a day in jail let alone pay.

Fun fact, it happens everywhere a service is deemed a necessity. Ontario for example is STILL paying off debts from Ontario Hydro / Hydro One / Liberal Slush Fund. Difference is we have added risks because people invested their pensions'n shit in the scheme. Remember the power outage that knocked out everything from NY to Ontario? Yeah, it's still held over our head to justify RETARDED spending on hydro.

Re:How is that possible??

[bobbied]

The government of PR has over spent on other things so are incapable of bailing out the electric company. The electric company hasn't been maintaining it's infrastructure for decades. Hurricane comes though and blows away what little infrastructure was there. This is the result.

It's a catch 22... Folks are leaving the island in droves because living conditions suck, reducing economic activity and reducing tax receipts the government has to service it's debt and sucking any cash available to improve living conditions, public infrastructure and law enforcement which leads to a lower standard of living... Rinse lather and repeat... But this downward spiral has been going on long before last year's storm, it just hastened the process.

Re: How is that possible??

[Bryansix]

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.

Re: How is that possible??

[dj245]

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.

Re: How is that possible??

[Walter White]

We'll see what the corrupt government of Puerto Rico does.

Before you lay the entire blame on the Puerto Rican government I suggest you broaden your sources a bit. Quoting from Wikipedia

The Government of Puerto Rico is a republican form of government with separation of powers, subject to the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the United States.

(emphasis mine.)

For more on that, please see https://congressionaldish.com/....

I doubt that PR is entirely blameless for their present situation, but they've had a lot of help from our congress.

Re: How is that possible??

[edtice1559]

I doubt nothing in your statement. But PR has no money due a number of factors of which years of mismanagement is one. The inability to make necessary capital investments is a big problem.

Re: How is that possible??

[bill_mcgonigle]

Congress is responsible for a lot of the poverty in PR. Christ, a ship from China isn't even allowed to dock in PR because of US laws - everything has to go to mainland US and brought over on US ships. The costs are staggering - one Walmart with access to direct shipping could do more to help PR than dozens of hair-brained political schemes. And good luck attracting private capital when the markets are regulated beyond the breaking point.

Re:How is that possible??

[dgatwood]

PREPA - Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority [aeepr.com] is a public corporation, not private. One of the benefits of socialized utilities is that they can spend other people's money forever.

Socialized utilities work pretty well in other parts of the United States (e.g. TVA). So what's different about Puerto Rico? Oh, yeah. That's right. It's dirt poor in large part because of bad U.S. trade policies that actual states don't have to deal with (the Jones Act in particular). They wouldn't be in this mess if the Puerto Rico statehood referendum had passed back in 1998. This has jack to do with socialized utilities and everything to do with Congress treating Puerto Rico like America's bastard child.

Stiff the creditors

[Seven Spirals]

Stiff the power company's creditors. Allow them to declare bankruptcy. Then re-capitalize the whole thing without debt and move on with what you can actually pay for. If that's impossible or they are too corrupt/incompetent to get that done, then as an individual you should factor in whole-house power generation before getting a house or moving to PR. I'm not saying this with a shaking finger or judgment, I'm just saying it seems like common sense, now.

Re: Stiff the creditors

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Stiff the creditors

[HornWumpus]

The only smart people on the left are those angling to be in charge. The rest are just chumps.

Re:Stiff the creditors

[Uberbah]

And then the next time they try to issue bonds or borrow in some other way for some large dollar project, all the potential lenders will treat them as junk and want 15% interest to cover the fact that they'll likely default again.

Common talking point but completely false. Countries that have defaulted on debts have been able to get credit at much lower rates than that, and quickly. Why? Because their economy is now free to grow without their GDP being siphoned off into making debt payments to colonizers. That's part of the reason why people who declare bankruptcy in the U.S. immediately see their mailboxes full of credit card offers.

How did the people of Puerto Rico allow this?

[FeelGood314]

Democracy is the best way for people to remove a government peacefully. I do realize that in the USA that's generally not possible, American's can only vote for "the other lizard", you can't actually remove both. However, in almost every other place in the world such gross mismanagement of the economy would lead to at least a viable opposition being created. What is so special about the USA when their government (i.e. congress) regularly has support in the low teens. The government of Syria has more support and they have to use violent suppression to stay in power.

I've lived in the USA both in the Bay area and in a wealthy part of black Decatur Georgia. I like Americans. I really don't understand their support for their government.

Re:How did the people of Puerto Rico allow this?

[Solandri]

"The government" is the one responsible for the horrid state of the power grid in Puerto Rico, both structurally and financially. The power company is publicly owned (i.e. government controlled) and they prohibit anyone else from selling power.

Any time you create a situation like that, there's a risk the people managing the utility will become complacent about doing their jobs or in some cases simply not doing their jobs, because there's no way for them to lose their jobs. There's nothing wrong with government-owned utilities and programs so long as you're careful to monitor for and stomp out such complacency. But if you fail to do so, you wind up with a sub-par infrastructure which costs far more to operate than it should.

That's the thing most people don't seem to get about the public/private debate. It isn't that public ownership is always better than private ownership, or private is always better than public. It's that sometimes public is better than private, and sometimes private is better than public. Depending on the problems you're experiencing, it can be beneficial to make a publicly-owned company private. Or make a privately-owned company public. The key is to take the right action depending on the exact circumstances which are causing problems. Both have their advantages, and both have their failure modes.

Unfortunately, we've developed philosophies where people think public ownership is always superior, or private is always superior. Meaning the people will keep voting for the very people who caused the situation they're suffering with, and the problem never gets fixed. That's the Achilles heel of democracy - it relies on the public being informed to function properly. A deceived public can steer a democracy straight into the ground (or in this case, into bankruptcy).

Re:How did the people of Puerto Rico allow this?

[be951]

Two senators. Every state has two senators. You don't get to vote for them both at the same time, because they are elected (overall) 1/3 at a time due to their 6 year terms. But every district in the states is represented by one House member and two Senators.

Re:Didn't they send away help????

[Nidi62]

Is this the same place that sent away the crews that had started rebuilding the infrastructure after the hurricane because they suspected cronyism with the Trump Administration?

Because a company with an employee count that can totaled on the hand of a drunk carpenter is the best possible choice to rebuild the power infrastructure of a whole island. Not to mention the contract prevented the PR government from auditing the contract and that the company was charging over $300 per hour for each worker.... Their contract was bigger than the one for the Army Corp of Engineers! That whole situation smelled worse than, well, a San Juan fish market after a few weeks of no refrigeration.

Re:PR is a third world country.

[Linsaran]

It's an extreme example of what happens when you allow the rich to dictate financial policy against all bounds of sanity.

A test bed opportunity?

[jenningsthecat]

I'm wondering if Puerto Rico might be a good place for some companies to test and showcase new power technologies. If the country's electrical grid is utter crap, then perhaps the fastest way out of the hole is to abandon large parts of it in favour of localized wind and solar capacity, with battery storage and some fossil-fuel generation capability as backup. Maybe even a couple of those dumpster-sized nuclear generators, if they're buried deep enough...

Yes, it will cost money. That could be partially offset by the good publicity and the possible tax write-offs. It's also an opportunity to try out experimental ideas and processes in a place where the people will be a lot more accepting of failures and interruptions, because right now they have nothing to lose. That's worth money in its own right. And much of the work could be done with cheap local labour. The Puerto Rican economy could benefit in three ways - reliable power, local jobs, and technical training that would raise the level of local expertise. I could see Elon Musk taking the lead on this, and perhaps other companies would jump on board as well.

Depending on the electrical grid to power households and small businesses is kind of quaint anyway. Local power generation provides redundancy, avoids single points of failure, reduces transmission losses, and is friendlier to renewable energy. The Grid should power industry, and serve only as a backup for less power-intensive users. Puerto Rico might be a good place to start moving in that direction.

Re:Rebuilt above ground I bet

[ledow]

Most of the UK's power infrastructure is above ground.

They get just the same, if not worse, weather as Germany.

We don't have these problems.

It's not nothing to do with under/overground, it's to do with designing and maintaining the system properly.