CNE – Centro Para Una Nueva Economía – Center for a New Economy
Non-profit, economic research and policy development organization
On February 7, representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy presented a summary of the findings of the PR100 Study. While the PR100 Final Report will not be released until late March, in this policy brief we highlight some of the findings of the PR100 Summary due to their importance and their potential policy implications for Puerto Rico’s electricity sector.
Now in 2023, the reconstruction and transformation of Puerto Rico’s electric power system is entering a critical stage, as several important processes—PREPA’s operational and financial restructuring; the commencement of large-scale projects to rebuild the grid; and the elaboration of a new Integrated Resource Plan—converge at a key point in time.
In this Policy Brief, we will present an analysis of the principal components of the Generation Operation and Maintenance Agreement, including the basic structure of the transaction; the compensation of the Operator; the estimated savings to be generated as a result of hiring a private operator to operate and maintain the Legacy Generation Assets; the planned decommission of most of the existing facilities that currently use fossil fuels to generate electricity in Puerto Rico; and the resulting structure of Puerto Rico’s electricity market.
It has become a bit of an end of year tradition: Congress is scrambling again to enact legislation to keep the federal government open. Unfortunately for the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico, Congress is also scrambling to provide additional funding for the island’s Medicaid program and avoid a so-called “Medicaid cliff.”
El 2022 cierra con un balance de avances fiscales y de incertidumbre económica. Los factores que apuntan al alza superan actualmente los riegos a la baja, debido principalmente a las proyecciones de la inversión federal en infraestructura. Pero esa inversión no está completamente bajo nuestro control y no es recurrente. Resulta imperativo, entonces, que Puerto Rico comience a diseñar una estrategia de crecimiento económico a mediano y largo plazo de cara al 2023.
Election results in the U.S. midterm elections are still coming in as we write this CNE Review but the big picture is fairly clear. Adapting to the new political conditions in the U.S. is the only strategy likely to be successful in avoiding two years of stagnation and achieving some policy victories in Washington.
El Huracán Fiona volvió a dejar al desnudo la vulnerabilidad sustancial de la sociedad puertorriqueña. La pregunta clave que se debe hacer es: ¿por qué cinco años después del huracán María el proceso de reconstrucción está tan atrasado?
We believe the current confluence of events calls for President Biden to take bold action and order the creation of an entity similar to the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, which was created by President Obama under Executive Order 13632 of 7 December 2012.
