Cries of “Fuera, LUMA” (Get out, LUMA) are once again being heard in Puerto Rico as the private power company continues to suffer failure after failure.
It’s hard to believe that almost seven years have passed since Hurricane Maria devastated the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico in September 2017 and a majority of its residents went through the longest power blackout in U.S. history, with the last households reconnected to the grid almost a full year later.
Fast forward to 2021 when an explosion knocked out power to more than 2 million people in Puerto Rico and then to February, when we addressed the ongoing failure to provide aid post-Hurricane Fiona.
We’ve written about the massive failures of LUMA Energy, and now the company is in the news again. The island’s people have been faced with yet another series of blackouts in the midst of a dangerous heat wave. Mainland news outlets have covered the blackouts, but the U.S. Congress, the island’s inept and corrupt government, and LUMA Energy itself have yet to address the root causes of the power company’s foundering.
We folks who live here stateside, including the nearly 6 million Puerto Ricans in the diaspora, have to raise our voices and fight harder to ensure that this untenable situation, which is causing deaths and major economic issues, is changed.
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New York Times reporter John Yoon wrote an article titled, “Outage Leaves About 350,000 Customers in Puerto Rico Without Power”:
Authorities in Puerto Rico said they were working to restore electricity after an outage struck the island during maintenance on the electricity grid, leaving about 350,000 customers without power during a heat wave.
The outage, which began late Wednesday, struck after Luma Energy, which transmits and distributes electricity in Puerto Rico, said it was carrying out planned maintenance work on power plants around the island.
Puerto Rico has experienced chronic problems with electricity since 2017, when Hurricane Maria devastated the island. Residents of the island have lived through months of outages, some tied to deaths. The island has struggled to restore power, and its economy has suffered significantly, sparking protests and turning the island’s frail power grid into a political issue.
Gov. Pedro R. Pierluisi, who lost his bid for a second term last week, criticized the outage late Wednesday, condemning the power companies’ “lack of sense of urgency” in addressing the problems with the island’s aging power grid that he said had been going on for weeks.
The irony here is that Pierluisi has refused calls to cancel LUMA’s contract, claiming “the time is not right.”
Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia on Wednesday responded to calls for the cancellation of the contract with LUMA Energy, the private operator of the island’s electricity transmission and distribution system, saying that the contract must continue in his opinion because the bankruptcy process of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) has not been completed.
“As for the general theme of LUMA, it is the same as always,” the governor said in response to questions from the press. “Obviously, that is the operator we have for the transmission and distribution network which is operating under a supplementary contract because the bankruptcy of the Electric Power Authority is still pending, it has not been resolved.”
The reports stating the number of “customers” with outages are deceptive, as 350,000 households could easily mean well over 1 million people had no lights and no electric service.
Widespread outage hits Puerto Rico as customers demand ouster of private electric company
The outage is the most recent in a string of blackouts to hit Puerto Rico, which is still trying to rebuild the grid after Hurricane Maria razed it in 2017 as a Category 4 storm.
The outage prompted the mayor of the San Juan capital, Miguel Romero, to declare a state of emergency late Wednesday as he accused Luma of sharing limited information about the ongoing blackouts.
“There are thousands of children with specific feeding needs, as well as older adults who often need therapy machines to protect their health and often save their lives,” the decree stated.
Scores of Puerto Ricans took to social media to condemn the most recent outage and demand the ouster of Luma, noting that it occurred amid excessive heat warnings. Not all on the island of 3.2 million people with a poverty rate of more than 40% can afford generators or solar panels.
The fact that this occurred during a major heat wave has made the situation more dangerous. Here is one of the recent heat warnings from the National Weather Service:
Alexander Kaufman wrote “Dangerous Heat Wave Tests Puerto Ricans’ Ability To Survive The Latest Power Outages” for HuffPost:
This week marks a grim milestone in Puerto Rico’s weather record: For the first time, virtually every inch of the U.S. Caribbean territory’s 311-mile coastline is roasting in temperatures that feel like 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Federal forecasters say heat exhaustion or stroke are “likely with prolonged exposure.”
For Gloricela Santiago, 59, staying cool these nights means sleeping outside on her balcony, breathing in the fumes of neighbors’ generators roaring through sunrise. That’s because Santa Isabel, the seaside town where Santiago lives and works as a technician at a public housing complex, is one of three municipalities on Puerto Rico’s southern shore facing power outages that could last for seven weeks. Experts say workers can restore electricity in a matter of days, but the private utility that now controls Puerto Rico’s power system would need to use its own money rather than federal dollars.
“It is horrible. The heat is terrible. People cannot sleep and no longer have the budget to buy food,” Santiago said in Spanish, speaking over text message Monday night to save battery on her phone. “This is a crisis.”
NBC News’ Nicole Acevedo also covered the response from Rep. Nydia Velázquez in “Puerto Ricans struggle to grasp economic impact of recurrent power outages”:
Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., is asking the U.S. Department of Energy to help Puerto Rico track the economic losses from the recurrent power outages that have been plaguing the U.S. territory since the beginning of the month, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without electricity as the island grapples with heat warnings.
Small-business owners on the island are concerned about staying open as they incur additional costs to operate generators or repair damaged electronics needed to run their businesses. In San Juan, the capital, business owners reported being without electricity for nine consecutive days in early June. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans across the island endured prolonged power outages and voltage fluctuations — damaging home appliances and forcing residents to discard spoiled foods and medicines. The economic losses that business owners and consumers are enduring during these outages have been hard to measure.
In response, Velázquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, sent a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Friday requesting that Puerto Rico be added to the department's Interruption Cost Estimate Calculator system.
In the letter, obtained first by NBC News, Velázquez said the move will help Puerto Rican authorities measure the duration and frequency of outages and their economic impact, and help assess issues of compensation for people's losses.
"There must be increased transparency around the extent of the damage caused by the service interruptions," Velázquez wrote.
Angry Puerto Ricans have taken to the streets to protest LUMA—again:
Independent journalist Bianca Graulau weighed in with background information, pointing out that LUMA is a U.S./Canadian company.
In this recent TikTok posted to X (formerly Twitter), Graulau refers to a video she made last year, explaining the outages and the failures of LUMA Energy:
Many people became familiar with her work when Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny highlighted this documentary she produced in 2023 to accompany his song “El Apagón” (The Blackout):
There are other aspects to the “power struggle” on the island. A major one involves bondholders and a recent court decision. Joanisabel González wrote for El Nuevo Dia:
No More Electricity Increases campaign lashes out against court ruling favoring PREPA bondholders
The citizens’ campaign No More Electricity Increases pointed out that the court ruling that granted the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) bondholders the right to collect all the bonded debt issued by the public corporation is “completely divorced from the reality of Puerto Rico. According to the citizens’ organization that has spearheaded civic efforts against the Adjustment Plan (PDA-PPEA) presented by the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) and analyzed in a confirmation hearing process last March, Puerto Rico does not have the resources to pay the amount that the judges of the First Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled as good.
“This debt is unpayable and we are in bankruptcy proceedings precisely because it is impossible to pay what the bondholders are demanding,” said Cathy Kunkel, spokeswoman for the campaign.
According to Kunkel, formerly an analyst for the Institute for Energy and Financial and Economic Analysis (Ieefa), it is “a fiction and totally irresponsible” to believe that there is money left over from the electricity system to pay the bondholders the $8.5 billion amount established by the panel composed of judges William J. Kayatta, Jeffrey R. Howard and Julie Rikelman.
Kunkel said that if the bondholders succeed in collecting their claim, which will require the Title III court to approve electricity rate increases to pay $8.5 billion, “Puerto Rico will not have the capacity to rehabilitate its electrical system and will continue to suffer from an electrical system that risks lives and impedes the island’s economic recovery
Boricuas Unidos en la Diaspora (Boricuas United in the Diaspora) responded on X to the ruling, which was announced in The Wall Street Journal:
Puerto Rican cartoonist Kike Estrada, whose work is published in the newspaper Claridad and posted to social media, weighs in frequently on LUMA and its failures.
The caption below reads, “LUMA shows those suspected of causing the blackouts” (a rat, an iguana, a cat and a monkey).
The caption below reads, “Good night Puerto Rico”.
Juan Dalmau, a candidate for governor of Puerto Rico who is running on the Independence Party ticket, has called for rescinding LUMA’s contract:
Given the suffering of hundreds of communities in the country due to the constant blackouts and the terrible service provided by Luma Energy because of its inability to manage the energy issue in Puerto Rico, the gubernatorial candidate for the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) and the Alliance, Juan Dalmau, confirmed that, once he wins in November, his commitment will be to initiate a transition process to terminate the consortium's contract and implement a public, efficient and capable structure led by first-class professionals.
"We must remove politicking from the administration of any public corporation related to the energy system and establish a process that includes the generation, transmission and distribution of energy in harmony with renewable energy sources and return the energy system back to the hands of the people," said the candidate.
Dalmau has called out leaders of the New Progressive Party, known as PNP, and the Popular Democratic Party, known as PPD, for their hypocrisy on LUMA, since neither party fought the imposition of LUMA post-Hurricane Maria.
The tweet below reads, “LUMA ENERGY: LUMA complaints? Juan Dalmau reminded the PNP and PPD leaders who are complaining about LUMA Energy that it is a monster of their creation.”
As we move into hurricane season in the Caribbean, we can only hope that Puerto Rico is spared more destruction, since storms aren’t the only thing that causes power failures. Here’s hoping that the people of Puerto Rico will ultimately be able to seize the reins of power back from the profiteers who are destroying their homeland and forcing many of its people to leave, while those who remain are all too frequently left in darkness.
The slogan “Power to the people” takes on multiple meanings on the island.
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