Today, Explained - Puerto Rico’s power crisis

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Days after Ian, most Floridians now have their power back. Weeks after Fiona, more than 100,000 Puerto Rican households and businesses are still coping with blackouts and an outdated grid. The Washington Post’s Arelis Hernández explains. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hurricane Ian hit Florida and then swept along the Atlantic states last week and this weekend. Millions of people lost power, but for the most part, the electricity was pretty quickly restored. Now, consider another storm. Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico in mid-September. Hurricane Fiona slams into Puerto Rico, knocking out power to the entire island. Their electricity is not back on. Tens of thousands are still without power in Puerto Rico as well. It continues to recover from Hurricane Fiona's hit two weeks ago. As Fiona bore down, some people still didn't have reliable electricity after the last major

hurricane there, Hurricane Maria in 2017. It sometimes seems like the only thing Puerto Rico's power grid does with any reliability is draw the ire of Puerto Ricans. Why is Puerto Rico's power grid so vulnerable? Coming up on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals.

Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Arlise Hernandez is a reporter for The Washington Post. And in 2017, she was in Puerto Rico covering what happened there after Hurricane Maria. On that trip, she met a woman, Maria Ortiz Biruet. She lives in the mountainous community of Utuado.

And Maria had had a tough time because the electricity was down. Water service wasn't a reality in her community. It's a series of pumps that are connected to the power grid that send water up to these, I guess, higher up elevation communities. And so she had built a routine around going to the creek every morning or going to the spring every morning to get water for various things that you need at home, whether it's washing dishes, that kind of thing. A few weeks ago, Arlis was back in Puerto Rico to check back in on Maria to see how she and others are doing five years after the hurricane. So I wanted to see whether, you know, water

service had improved, whether electricity service had improved, what life was like for her as a teacher, because at the time she was a teacher. And what I found is that so many people left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Some came back, but in her case, her class size was cut in half. Those kids didn't come back to Puerto Rico. Their parents made a decision that life without power was not a life they wanted to give their kids. So when I went back and saw Maria, who is now retired, and her words, you know, forced into retirement, about two years shy of her 30 years in teaching, the electricity reliability wasn't great. Every time it rained, the power would go out two to three times a week.

But at the time, they had water service. This is pre-Fiona. When you went, did you know that Hurricane Fiona was coming? I knew that there was a storm in the Atlantic. You don't come to Puerto Rico without knowing and keeping an eye on what's happening in the Atlantic. And in Puerto Rico, that's almost like their meteorologist, the local meteorologist is like, you know, the most famous person on the island. So I knew there was a system coming.

And so I deliberately left thinking that it wasn't going to be a big deal storm. It was a tropical storm when I left. Fiona strengthened into a category one storm earlier this afternoon. Forecasters say there is the potential for life-threatening flash flooding, mudslides and landslides. And I went right back. Heavy rains from Fiona caused flooding across the U.S. island territory, leading to damaged roads and collapsed bridges.

The entire island losing all electricity. More than three million residents face a dark and dangerous night ahead. Governor Pedro Pierluisi described the damage as catastrophic. What did you see? So we'll start in San Juan because I think that's what most people connect to. San Juan itself was not badly impacted at all by this storm. You know, there was some localized flooding and what was sort of inconceivable for so, so many people here is like, okay, Fiona did nothing here. Why are we without electricity for more than a week?

At one point, my aunt called me. She lives in the metro area here in San Juan and she was just, she needed to vent and she was just like screaming about how ridiculous it was that this was the category one storm who did absolutely nothing to San Juan. And still she's sitting in her bedroom completely in the dark. Past San Juan, things get much dicier when you start moving even across sort of the north side of the island to a place called Toa Baja,

which is a flood zone. A massive amount of flooding that took place there. I mean, people had mud up to like three and four feet that the river brought into their home. And because of the La Plata River that's very close by, moving to the south side, Salinas also experienced a massive amount of flooding. The interesting part about the southern region of Puerto Rico is that it's mostly dry. They had a drought there in 2019. Lo and behold, Hurricane Fiona comes, drops somewhere between 20 and 30 inches of rain. In Salinas, people are used to some level of floods. It's my grandmother's hometown. I've heard about these floods all of my life. But the level of flooding and the velocity and ferocity of the waters really stunned people and scared people in that community.

The last part that I'll mention is the west side of Puerto Rico, whereas the east side in San Juan saw very little damage. The west side, which for the most part had escaped the brunt of the bigger storms, including Maria and Irma, they got it bad. The storm came in through Cabo Rojo, which is a coastal town on the western edge of Puerto Rico, and those communities got walloped with wind. These folks saw up to 100 mile per hour winds. And so there was everything, flooding, mudslides, near complete destruction of the infrastructure over there. So those folks are going to be the last probably to get electricity and water. Electricity is starting to come, but because of the damages to the very old infrastructure out there,

we very well could see a humanitarian crisis emerging there. Do you have an answer to your aunt's question? If we didn't get hit that hard by the hurricane, why don't we have electricity? What's the answer there? That's a tough question to answer. It requires going back a few years and laying down the context of Puerto Rico's electrical grid woes. This is a system that was extremely fragile from the beginning, in part driven into the ground by the public power utility. PREPA is responsible for $9 billion of the government's $73 billion in debt.

They're currently going through Title III bankruptcy. This agency was notoriously corrupt. Not even Governor Rosseó would defend it. Many people in Puerto Rico see PREPA as a big, fat, corrupt political organization. Hurricane Maria, the corruption, the bankruptcy, the near total destruction of the power grid here in Puerto Rico gave the conservative leaders with the stamp of approval from the Fiscal Oversight Board. And what you have is an opportunity to bring in a private operator. And that's what they did about a year, year and a half ago.

There is a suspicion that what's being attempted is a classic case of what's known as disaster capitalism, the use of the aftermath of a natural disaster to push through the privatization of essential services, something Wall Street always wants but can't always get due to democratic popular opposition. Luma Energy is a private consortium of a Canadian and U.S. company, Atco and Quanta. They came in, were given very generous terms in a contract with the Puerto Rico government to take over distribution and transmission here in Puerto Rico. So those are the big towers and the power lines, which is mostly what got walloped in Hurricane

Maria. Generation, which are the power plants, the valuable assets, are still under the dying but still alive public power utility. Luma has been here now for about a year and a half. They had one year to study the system and officially took over last June. In that time, there is documented evidence that the performance of the power grid in Puerto Rico has precipitously declined in the sense that there have been more power outages, more interruptions, more voltage variations, meaning power surges that will destroy your appliances like, you know, a refrigerator or microwave or in some cases, maybe a laptop computer and television and that this has been far more frequent under luma than it ever was under prepa brenda otero owns a bakery near san juan every time the lights go out she loses money i think the last week i i could lose like a thousand dollars to be fair luma Energy has said they've had to do a lot of work. This is one of the most complicated power grids in the United States.

The way that it was designed was perfect for where Puerto Rico was about 70 years ago, more than 70 years ago, which was that what was then the sugar industries and the industries that were concentrated in the southern part of the island. So generation, the big power plants are in the south of the island and they string the transmissions lines, the big power conductors over the central mountainous region, which are very steep, very treacherous terrain, very difficult topography over the mountains to the north, where at the time that this system was built was not a population center in the way that it is now. Most of the consumption now happens in the north. So this is an outdated, ill-fitting power grid. I do have a great degree

of empathy for our customers who are, you know, often will say, well, you've been at it 11 months, why isn't it all fixed? And the truth is, it took decades for it to end up in the state it's in, and it's going to take us a few years to get it back to a system that is what we might expect in other parts of the world. What do you think is going to happen next with electricity in Puerto Rico? Where do you think all of this is headed? That's an interesting question. I don't believe that there is a lot of patience and tolerance left.

Endless outages have led people to protest in the street. Luma! Luma! Luma! The governor, for the first time, sort of articulated some doubt in the contract that they have with Luma. I know Luma inherited a very fragile grid. And I know that the reconstruction or the rebuilding of this grid will take years. But that's what they were hired for. They do have a deadline that they need to assess whether this 15-year contract was something they're going to continue with. The question that the governor is probably weighing, or at least I think critics would say he's weighing, is if that's a scenario that he can abide by.

Not having a backup plan or coming up with a backup plan in the event that they do decide to cancel Luma's contract. The other option is to renegotiate, to make the terms less generous than they are right now to put actual thresholds that they have to meet to make sure that Luma as an entity invests its own money in the system so that they have skin in the game and are not just using federal funds. So there are options. It remains to be seen what the Puerto Rican people and its political entities are willing to tolerate in that transaction. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

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and stronger and better prepared for the future. Today Explained, we're back. And we talked in the first half of the show about some of the problems that Puerto Rico has been having with its power grid. Vox science reporter, Umair Irfan, tell me about some of the potential solutions. One idea is that rather than having Puerto Rico as one giant integrated power grid, to sort of segment that power grid into smaller areas, what people typically call microgrids. And the idea is that by having these smaller isolated

pockets that generate and distribute electricity, a short or a fault in one area doesn't ripple through the entire grid. And one of the key ways they want to do this is to make sure you have distributed power generation, particularly with renewables, things like wind energy and solar energy. You can build those just about anywhere. They're not necessarily limited to areas where you have to ship in supplies. You don't need fuel to run a solar panel or a wind turbine. And so that gives you a lot more flexibility as far as where you can build. That's, you know, well and good in theory, but in practice, it's proven to be very challenging. You know, many Puerto Ricans were really keen on this idea after Hurricane Maria. But one, it's just a technically challenging thing to do to be able to, you know, get through all the paperwork and all the regulations that you actually have to go through in order to build microgrids and to build

pockets of power generation that can be more resilient over time. And of course, you know, wind and solar, while they don't need fuel, they're still, you know, vulnerable to other kinds of shocks. And so in parts of Puerto Rico where they have installed solar panels, they've had issues with maintenance and upkeep. And so those things are not trivial either, even when we're talking about renewable energy. And so there are still a lot of hurdles in the way of trying to do this. And in the meantime, what a lot of people have ended up doing as well is using backup diesel generators or backup gasoline power generators. So these are like these small appliances that you may have seen at hardware stores. And many of these networks that are being built are sort of ad hoc. And so there's the risk of electrical shock and power shortages and power kinds of disruption here because people are trying to do this on their own rather than waiting for the utility to step up and actually try to fix these problems. Puerto Rico knows it has problems, right? And it knows that it's not going

to fix them unless it gets something done. What is stopping the bureaucratic apparatus from just getting out of the way? Well, there's a few things. I mean, one is just kind of structural. You know, when you put a solar panel on your roof or install a wind turbine, you know, off the coast of where you live, that adds potentially competition for the utility. And they're not big fans of that unless they are the ones that are operating the solar panels and the wind turbines. And so for them, this is not really something that's in their financial interest. And over time, you know, costs have gone up for running Puerto Rico's power grid. And so that's made the utility much more keen on trying to recuperate those costs. And so as fuel costs go up, they have

to balance their books on their customers by raising rates. And if fewer people are buying electricity from them, then that means that they have to raise the rates on their remaining customers even more. And on top of that, Puerto Rico has been depopulating for years now, and certainly that did accelerate after Hurricane Maria. And even more recently, I think a lot of folks you would talk to have just had enough. And again, what that means is that the cost of running that power grid is distributed among fewer and fewer people, which means those people end up paying higher and higher rates over time. And so they have a less reliable grid with more blackouts, more intermittency, and they're paying through the nose for this. And of course, that's a really frustrating situation, which then encourages them and gives them an incentive to

leave. And that further worsens the situation. We've seen challenges, not just in Puerto Rico, but to power grids elsewhere in the United States in the past couple of years. Tell us what's been going on in Texas. Right. Texas is an interesting analogy here because Texas has kind of turned itself into an island. Their power grid doesn't integrate with much of the rest of the United States. And Texas made a deliberate decision to do that years ago because they didn't want federal regulation. If you're setting power across state lines and the federal government gets involved, Texas didn't want that.

And so they made a conspicuous decision to try to keep everything within their borders. The downside of that, though, is that when they need electricity from elsewhere, they can't get it, and we saw that happen with winter storm Uri a couple years ago. We're not used to winter storms like that in Texas, okay? Texas usually takes a lot of power plants offline during the winter because they don't really expect a lot of energy demand, and they take them offline to do maintenance. But because of that winter storm, demand shot up and that led to blackouts. And much of the power grid infrastructure also like was physically being impacted by the storm. You know, many power stations could not operate in that cold weather. Piles of coal froze at coal power plants. And so like they literally couldn't get the fuel into

the power plants in order to keep them running. And so, it just shows how vulnerable these power systems can be to these kinds of extreme weather shocks, even in a place like Texas, which is, you know, the energy hub of the United States. So, it's one of the largest energy producing states. And they still struggle to get energy at a time when, you know, the demand was high, but the supply from electricity producers was very low. Then there's California, which hasn't seen outages, like in Texas and Puerto Rico, but does have power grid problems. How would you characterize what's going on there? Well, California has had outages over the decades. You may remember in the

early 2000s, there were these rolling blackouts because of these strange power market rules that California had implemented at the time. And that tied into the Enron company and the scandal with them. And so they did sort of revise their power market rules in order to make sure something like that can't happen again. But California, like Texas, is also facing extreme conditions as well. Mainly for California, it's in the summer where they're dealing with periods of extreme heat, but not just heat, but wildfire. And the concern is that not only do people use a lot more electricity when they're switching on their air conditioners, running power to all these remote areas in the state, you know, through these power lines, that can actually trigger fires. Cal Fire has confirmed what's long been suspected. The Camp Fire, California's most

deadly and destructive fire ever, was caused by PG&E transmission lines. We've seen in recent years utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric have been convicted in court of manslaughter charges for causing wildfires with their equipment. And the way these utilities have responded is that in periods of high fire risk, they deliberately shut off power to millions of customers. They call these public safety power shutoffs. And basically, they trigger deliberate blackouts in parts of the state when they expect periods of hot, dry weather and record demand. And as they were creeping in on just an imbalance where they thought demand would exceed the supply and lead to blackouts, they sent an emergency text message alert to basically everyone in California and told them, conserve energy now to protect public health and safety. Extreme heat is straining the state energy grid. Power interruptions may occur unless you take action. Turn off or reduce non-essential power if health

allows now until 9 p.m. And people did respond. You know, they did see a major drop in power usage. But, you know, that's how dicey the situation was that, you know, they essentially had to send out an emergency alert and have their customers respond rather than just having the utility respond to a power mismatch. How does what's happening in Puerto Rico and what has happened in Puerto Rico fit into what is happening in Texas and California? How should the rest of the United States be thinking about what's happening in Puerto Rico in light of the fact that this is happening elsewhere in the United States? Is it the same? Is it different?

I think there, for the grace of God, go all of us. This is a situation that, you know, in Puerto Rico, they have some very unique circumstances, but many of the problems they're facing are playing out in smaller part in other parts of the country. I mean, the fact that Puerto Rico is struggling with an aging power grid. I mean, many parts of the U.S. have also underinvested in their infrastructure. Puerto Rico is dealing with extreme weather events. Many other parts of the U.S. are dealing with extreme weather, and many of them are also coping with, you know, just long-term underinvestment in this infrastructure. So while Puerto Rico may be the most acute and severe case of what can happen if you have this combination of neglect, climate change, and mismanagement intersecting, you know, these factors are playing out in smaller parts

and other parts of the country, and they can, again, intersect and cause more severe problems as well. So it's worth trying to get ahead of them. I mean, I think this is a really an important lesson that one, that this can happen in many other parts of the country, maybe not to this scale or not to the severity, but certainly it will be costly and devastating to lose power for days at a time. The other thing to remember is that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. Puerto Ricans are Americans. This is part of our country that is being affected by these blackouts. And I think it's kind of odd, perhaps if you're a patriot, this should be shameful that we have a part of our country that can be blacked out so readily by storms or even without storms happening. Remember this blackout that we just saw after Hurricane Fiona was not even the first island-wide

blackout this year. They had another one back in April. So this level of fragility in one of the wealthiest countries in the world that produces so much energy is kind of mind-boggling. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. It was edited by Matthew Collette. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Maldita sea, otro apagón. Vamos pa' los bleachers a prender un blon. Antes que a Pipo le dé un bofetón.