By The Star Staff
Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia announced Tuesday that his administration will soon be on the way to designing, building and operating a 300-megawatt natural gas plant, insisting that the process was well underway.
The government is expected to announce in the near future the name of the entity selected to carry out the project.
“More generation is needed in Puerto Rico,” the governor said. “The Energy Bureau has already approved that we have a 300-megawatt natural gas plant. So that is coming for sure and the corresponding announcement will be made in due time.”
Regarding the investigation that Pierluisi commissioned after the blackouts in June, he pointed out that both the Public-Private Partnerships Authority (P3A) and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) have hired an independent entity to carry out the investigation and he knows that it is in the final stage.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has assigned Puerto Rico over $11 billion for the reconstruction of its frail and antiquated electrical grid, although less than $1 billion will be allocated for generation.
Last year the P3A published a tender, seeking bidders willing to design, build, operate and maintain a natural gas plant, which would also be convertible to some other fuel, such as hydrogen. The request for proposals was issued under an amendment that the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau authorized in the Integrated Resources Plan in 2022.
“In any case, meeting that goal, we will hopefully need to have a base load generation that gives us the proper protection, the proper redundancy for our system,” the governor said last year. “At the same time that we are meeting that goal, we have to comply with requirements imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We know that those requirements, unless the EPA offers us some kind of waiver, cannot be met by the plants we have in Puerto Rico that burn oil. The plants that burn diesel, in general terms, can meet those emission requirements [and] those that burn natural gas as well.”
“It makes all the sense in the world to have an additional plant that burns natural gas,” Pierluisi added. “What the government is doing at the moment is basically complying with what the Energy Bureau has already ordered.”
The RFQ issued by the P3A provides that neither Genera PR, then in transition to operate PREPA’s legacy power plants, nor LUMA Energy, the private operator of the PREPA transmission and distribution network, may be bidders.
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