There's Still No Light In Puerto Rico

An "energy insurrection", or something like that, happened in Puerto Rico. After hurricane Maria struck last year, eighty percent of the island's electrical transmission lines went down and it soon became evident that Prepa (the country's electric power authority) had no capacity to fix the damage quickly and effectively. 

Islanders were desperate without energy. Many decided to leave the country. Others stayed and decided to take matters into their own hands: special brigades of volunteers worked independently to try to fix the grid, NGOs came up with alternative solutions, and one single worker from Prepa, Jorge Bracero, stepped up and became the unofficial voice of hope and answers by sharing information through his Facebook page when no one else was doing so.

"Bracero became one of the most trusted voices on technical questions that had come to feel like existential ones. How many people are connected now? What percentage of the population? When is the 50900 transmission line going to be operative again? The bigger question was not so much whether the crisis would lead to a new model for climate resilience, but whether the existing system would even be up and running by the next hurricane season. Doing so would require repairing far more than the damage caused by a single storm in September 2017".

A year has passed and the system is still in bad shape. Prepa, the largest public electricity utility in the United States, is just a symbol of the island's economic collapse and vulnerability. It was already becoming evident a year before the hurricane, when a single power switch overheated and left 1.5 million Puerto Ricans without lights. 

The government announced Prepa would be privatised, but the Puerto Rican Energy Commission will not be allowed to oversee the sale of the contracts and, since the storm last September, five executive officers of Prepa have resigned. Many islanders are wondering if there's actually anyone, besides Bracero, they can trust.