Federal board steps in to accelerate power grid repairs in Puerto Rico

A federal control board that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances announced Wednesday that it will step in to help speed up projects to fix the island’s crumbling power grid as widespread outages persist.

Only $1.2 billion out of more than $17 billion authorized by US Congress to stabilize the US territory’s grid and improve reliability has been spent in the seven years since Hurricane Maria hit the island as a Category Four storm, said Robert Mujica, the board’s executive director. “We need to move faster,” he said at the board’s public meeting. “The current situation … is not acceptable.”

A growing number of Puerto Ricans frustrated by the outages are demanding that the US territory’s government cancel its contract with Luma Energy, which operates the transmission and distribution of power. Several gubernatorial candidates have echoed that call, but Mujica rejected such a move. “We cannot go back to the old system,” he said as he recognized that Puerto Rico experiences “too many power failures.”