Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority

Over the years the budget for maintenance, such as clearing trees near power lines, has diminished: in 2007 it was $251 million and in 2014 it was $202 million.[5][6]

Throughout its history, PREPA has suffered several outages that have left the entire island of Puerto Rico without power.

One of these islandwide outages occurred on September 20, 2016 due to a fire at one of PREPA's plants—Central Aguirre.[7] All of Puerto Rico was without power for three days.

On occasion, entire sectors are left without power when an animal, such as a cat or an iguana, causes damage to the system.[8]

Hurricanes Irma and Maria sharply reduced the availability of electricity throughout the island

At the first days of September 2017, the eye of Hurricane Irma passed north of the island. The strong winds left 1 million residents without power. Power had been restored to 980,000 people by September 20, when Hurricane Maria struck, leaving nearly the entire island without power. Two weeks later, power had been restored to about 10% of customers.[9] Full restoration was expected to take months, and many Puerto Ricans bought generators.[10] Electric companies in unaffected areas ordinarily make contracts for speedy assistance to those hit by disaster, but in this case negotiations took weeks.

The initial $300 million contract for power restoration was given to Whitefish Energy, a Montana company which had only two employees on the day the hurricane struck.[11] The award was controversial on those and other grounds, and was cancelled on October 29. By December 2017, the Army Corps of Engineers had other contractors in place, along with crews brought in through mutual aid agreements with utilities such as Con Edison.[12]

Six weeks after Hurricane Maria, 30% of customers had been restored.[13] After two months, almost half had been restored.[14]

On January 6, 2018, representatives of FEMA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and their armed security details entered a Palo Seco warehouse owned by PREPA to obtain and distribute a massive store of spare parts were needed to restore grid power. PREPA has been accused of hoarding the materials and hence delaying the restoration of power. The equipment has since been distributed.[15]

In January 2018, it had been predicted that generation would reach 95% by the following month, and 100% of customers would be restored by June 2018.

On April 18, 2018, an accident at a transmission line knocked out the electrical grid of Puerto Rico. All the island lost power. The following afternoon, PREPA announced that service had been restored to 97% of customers, the same percentage as before this blackout. 40,000 customers were still out of service due to the hurricane seven months earlier.[16]

With June 1 the official start of the 2018 hurricane season, an estimated 11,000+ customers remained without power, possibly for another two months.[17] Although an estimated $3.8B was spent on power grid work since the September hurricanes, the grid is still considered fragile and vulnerable.[18] PREPA announced a $500M one-year master services agreement with MasTec for further power grid reconstruction and modernization services.[19][20]

In 2017, during Hurricane Maria an unsolicited offer by New Fortress Energy was made to PREPA. In 2020, a court order required the awarded-contract documents be made public and showed several irregularities including that the company doesn't have a liquid-gas production track record in Puerto Rico and that rather than go through a bidding process, the contract was approved quickly. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey was listed as a paid lobbyist for PREPA, in the documents. Ingrid Vila Biaggi, the former Puerto Rico Chief of Staff, made a request for an independent investigation.[21]

PREPA's board of directors serves as the authority's governing body, with a membership that usually consists of private citizens entrusted with representing the public interest and may or may not include exofficio political officeholders (typically the Secretary of Economic Development and Commerce). Three members of the board are directly elected by consumers by plurality-at-large; two of them by residential consumers and one by commercial ones. However, when both the governor and the legislature belong to the same party, one of the earliest laws amended by the legislature is the one governing PREPA's board composition. The governor is usually required to appoint four members with the advice and consent of the Senate, who along with the incumbent political officeholders which serve in ex officio capacity effectively render the authority a partisan tool rather than an electric utility.

The last structural change to the board occurred on June 11, 2018 after governor Ricardo Rossello.

PREPA serves close to 1.5 million customers through several power plants:[22][23]

Puerto Rico has 21 hydroelectric plants.[37]

The public corporation also provides fiber optic broadband to private carriers through one of its subsidiary, PREPA Networks. PREPA is also studying the possibility of selling energy to the United States Virgin Islands with the installation of an underwater power cable between Fajardo and the island of St. Thomas—similar to the power cable with which it services its clients in the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra.[38]

There are four labor unions that represent the workers from the authority exclusively UTIER, UITICE, UEPI, and UPAEE.[39][40]