Slashdot Mirror
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 The island only has one electric company, and prior to Maria, it was $9 billion in debt and utilizing outdated infrastructure and equipment.
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.
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.
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.