1.5 million smart meters for Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico utility Luma plans island-wide smart meters among smart grid and other initiatives to improve reliability and services for customers over the next three years.

The initiative, which is planned to get underway within the next few months, is aimed at improving reliability and resiliency, enabling faster and more efficient billing, shortening restoration times and supporting the modernisation of the grid.

Alongside it, the installation of more than 5,000 smart grid automation devices is planned by July 2024 and modernisation upgrades should be executed at 50 substations, including the complete reconstruction of six major substations, over the next two years.

Together these programmes form part of a major new ‘Building a Better Energy Future’ plan to start within the next 12 months focused on improving system reliability and customer support services.

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“Nothing is more important for Luma than continuing to improve reliability and the service that we provide to our customers,” says Juan Saca, President and CEO since July 1.

“These combined initiatives, designed to build a better energy future, represent billions of dollars of investment into Puerto Rico’s electric system and are focused on improving overall reliability, as well as providing new ways to communicate and serve our customers in every municipality.”

Other reliability improvement initiatives planned are the repair and replacement of 100,000 utility poles across the island over the next five years and the clearance of vegetation at almost 26,000km of powerlines over the next three years.

With vegetation issues the leading cause of outages, accounting for more than half across the island – and particularly during the occurrence of hurricanes – this latter initiative is considered of historic significance and will extend the more than 5,300km of powerlines already cleared of vegetation since 2021.

The proposal is to clear a length of about 9,200km in the first year, leading to an expected 15% improvement in reliability, followed by another 11,100km in 2025 and the remaining sections in 2026 leading to an overall outage reduction of 35-45%.

On the customers service side, some of the initiatives planned include the launch of new energy savings programmes, the promotion of more ways to pay bills and more transparent and timely updates on service interruptions.

In addition, more than 300,000 streetlights are to be installed in 78 municipalities over the next three years.

Progress in Puerto Rico since 2021

In announcing the new initiative Luma also points to achievements over the past two years since it started operations to improve reliability and resiliency and create a cleaner and more customer-focused energy system.

In addition to the vegetation clearance, these include the installation of over 1,500 automated distribution devices, the replacement of 8,900 damaged poles and the installation of almost 50,000 streetlights.

More than 64,000 customers with 396MW of rooftop solar PV were connected, with the number averaging 3,000 new connections per month.