Puerto Rico’s effort to secure 800 megawatts (MW) of temporary emergency generation during 2025 was a prolonged struggle marked by bureaucratic delays, political intervention, supplier disputes and open conflict with federal overseers. Internal chats between Energy Czar Josué Colón Ortiz and Osvaldo Carlo Linares, counsel for the Third-Party Procurement Office (3PPO), revealed by journalist Jay Fonseca, show a process that began amid crisis.
By early 2025, Colón was warning the grid was running on borrowed time. Six major units were offline at once, including Aguirre 1, whose generator failure caused 260,000 customers to lose power in a single event. Aguirre 2’s return depended on an inspection at an off-island manufacturer, and San Juan 6 and 7, Palo Seco 4 and Costa Sur 5 were also out of service.
Available generation hovered around 2,800 MW while summer demand was expected to exceed 3,200 MW. In one message, Colón wrote that Puerto Rico faced a deficit of 1,846 MW and that the only way to avoid blackouts was to urgently procure 800 MW of temporary generation, a job delegated to the 3PPO. The first attempt collapsed almost immediately: the 3PPO issued a request for proposals in March 2025 and selected Power Expectations, but the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau later issued an order modifying the procurement’s conditions, forcing cancellation of the entire process. A second RFP selected three companies: Power Expectations, Gothams Energy and Javelin Global Commodities.