During Committee hearing, CEO Juan Saca delivers prepared remarks on LUMA’s progress, ongoing challenges being faced, and the commitment to building a better energy future for Puerto Rico

San Juan, Puerto Rico, Sept. 26, 2024 – Today, in a joint hearing with representatives from GeneraPR, the Central Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience (COR3) and the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (PREB), Juan Saca, LUMA President and CEO, delivered opening remarks as part of his testimony before the U.S. House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs. In the remarks, Mr. Saca provided an overview of the scope of LUMA’s progress, the specific actions to improve reliability and resiliency, its record on responding to powerful storms and hurricanes, as well as the many steps the company has taken to address the ongoing historic challenges that continue to impact the energy system due to decades of neglect under the previous operator.

In the prepared remarks, LUMA also reaffirmed its commitment to Puerto Rico and continuing to build on the historic progress that the over 4,000 LUMA team has made over the last 39 months since taking over operations of the T&D system.

The following are excerpts from Juan Saca’s remarks, as prepared for delivery to members of the House Committee.

On the state of ongoing challenges:

“LUMA took over as the transmission and distribution operator of Puerto Rico’s electric grid in June 2021, only four years following the devastating impacts of Hurricane Maria.

Even before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s electric grid was well below utility reliability standards…was also allowed to deteriorate due to financial mismanagement, eventually resulting in a 10-billion-dollar bankruptcy in 2017, which today remains unresolved in arbitration.

While the over 4,000 LUMA team members continue to make progress across multiple areas to build a better energy future for our 1.5 million customers, the impact of past failures, which pre-date LUMA, remain an enduring challenge to progress which we are working incredibly hard to overcome.”

On key areas of progress:

“Our team works every day to replace aging and failing infrastructure that was neglected for decades with new, reliable equipment. These are long-term reliability investments, and making the necessary structural changes is a monumental and time-consuming task, but we are making significant progress.

To date, we have replaced over 17,850 utility poles with new poles able to withstand 160 mile-per-hour winds and installed over 9,000 automation devices to reduce the duration and impact of outages, which have already prevented over 140 million service interruption minutes. 

The impact of this has been real – over the last year, more than 95% of customers had concurrent service more than 98% of the time when generation was available.”

On the response to Tropical Storm Ernesto:

“One of our most important responsibilities is emergency response. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our entire LUMA team, including more than 1,700 trained field workers, in just 54 hours, power was restored to more than 90% of customers impacted by Tropical Storm Ernesto.

With two months left in this hurricane season, emergency preparedness continues to be our top priority. Our team is taking actions to prepare our response to storm-related outages and has over $282 million in on-hand materials to use in an emergency and over 1,100 field workers ready to respond quickly to any outage.”

On LUMA’s capital improvement projects:

“In addition to our day-to-day improvement efforts, LUMA has also initiated 460 critical projects to FEMA, with 171 approved and 87% of those, or 149 projects, already in construction or completed. A significant achievement on its own, considering PREPA did not move one capital project to construction.

We will continue to work together with our partners at FEMA, DOE, COR3…Thanks to their support, LUMA has recently launched two major federally funded initiatives, which when complete, will significantly improve service for our customers.

The first initiative is the historic multi-year, island-wide Vegetation Safety and Reliability Initiative, which will clear vegetation from over 16,000 miles of powerlines and reduce outages by up to 45% once complete.

The second initiative is the Smart Meter Initiative to replace all 1.5 million electric meters across Puerto Rico with new technology that will help detect outages faster, enable a more timely response when they occur and improve customer service.

To keep our customers and stakeholders informed of these important initiatives, we launched a Progress for Puerto Rico Dashboard, that provides monthly updates on our work to improve service and transform and modernize the electrical system – a goal we are determined to achieve for Puerto Rico.”

On LUMA’s call for collaboration and unwavering commitment to Puerto Rico:

“Throughout all our work, LUMA remains committed to transparency in our operations as we continue our mission to build an energy system founded on operational excellence for all our customers.

The infrastructure will take time to modernize – this is and will be a multi-year transformation that will require even greater cooperation with local and federal partners, who we hope will work with us to address these legacy challenges and help advance critical FEMA funding.

LUMA is committed to Puerto Rico. Our team is committed to Puerto Rico. We will complete this transformation. And working together with our partners, LUMA will build a more reliable, safer, resilient, and cleaner energy future for the island we are proud to call home.”

To learn more about LUMA’s progress and the ongoing efforts to improve energy service across Puerto Rico, visit: progresodelumapr.com.

About LUMA

LUMA is a Puerto Rican company that, since June 1, 2021, operates and manages the electric power transmission and distribution system in Puerto Rico. LUMA is a company driven by a mission to transform the electrical transmission and distribution system to provide all Puerto Ricans with the reliable, resilient, clean, and affordable electrical service they deserve. As a customer-centric company, LUMA’s entire workforce is focused on safely delivering an exceptional customer service experience to its 1.5 million customers.