Bondholders of Puerto Rico’s bankrupt power utility, PREPA, said on Friday that the damage to the local electric grid by Hurricane Maria is not as bad as the island’s government says, and could be fixed quickly with an outside energy expert in charge, Reuters reported. The PREPA bondholders made the argument in a written filing in federal court in San Juan. The utility filed for a form of bankruptcy in June to shed $9 billion of debt, while Puerto Rico’s government filed for bankruptcy in May. It has $72 billion of total debt. The bondholders want to persuade the judge overseeing the island’s bankruptcy to pick an energy industry expert to run PREPA, from a list of names on which creditors may or may not have input. Citing their own assessment of grid damage, led by energy consultant Derek HasBrouck, the bondholders said some 95 percent of transmission assets are fully functional, and observed only “a few broken poles” among 75 distribution substations that were visually inspected. Those numbers contrast starkly with the Puerto Rican government’s assessment that 80 percent of the electric grid was destroyed when Maria made landfall on September 20, the most powerful storm to hit Puerto Rico in decades.
