Montreal-based infrastructure engineering and project management specialist AtkinsRéalis Group Inc. will provide architectural and engineering services to improve, strengthen and harden Puerto Rico’s long-troubled electrical transmission and distribution operations infrastructure. 

The company says its focus will be on permanently improving power lines and substations for LUMA Energy, a private power company that operates and manages the island's electric power transmission and distribution system. LUMA, owned by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), also is responsible for maintaining and modernizing power infrastructure that serves about 1.5 million customers.

No cost for the AtkinsRéalis contract was announced, but In February, LUMA announced that the company’s Guaynabo, P.R.-based operation is working with Linxon US LLC to build nine energy interconnection points to add more than 990 MW of clean energy and more than 700 MW of storage to Puerto Rico’s electric grid.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Puerto Rico consumes 70 times more energy than it produces, with petroleum, natural gas and coal providing 90% of its electrical generation capacity. Long vulnerable to disruption due to location and underinvestment, the island’s electrical infrastructure was largely destroyed in September 2017 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall just two weeks after Category 5 Hurricane Irma passed nearby.

The loss of approximately 18,000 miles of transmission lines linking major generating plants located along Puerto Rico’s southern coast to its main population centers in the north contributed to an 11-month blackout—the longest electrical outage in U.S. history.

Since LUMA took over management of bankrupt PREPA’s transmission and distribution infrastructure under a 15-year agreement with Puerto Rico’s Public-Private Partnerships Authority in mid-2021, the island has continued to experience service failures, including an extensive outage following Hurricane Fiona in September 2022. Claiming it inherited a poorly designed, managed and maintained system, LUMA has gradually made system-wide upgrades with the help of more than $12 billion in FEMA funding.

In a Feb. 5, letter to the authority, LUMA President and CEO Juan Saca touted accomplishments to date such as “replacing 21,600 utility poles with more storm-resilient infrastructure, clearing nearly 5,500 miles of overgrown vegetation from powerlines and installing nearly 10,000 grid automation devices.” 

The company also regularly updates its emergency response plan that “provides comprehensive protocols for responding to disasters and electric utility events” and “addresses outages caused by natural events, human-caused incidents and technological causes.”