He previously served as CEO of Ascendant Group Ltd., a Bermuda-based energy and infrastructure holding company. Higgins took over as PREPA’s CEO in March.
#COBRA BUILDING ENVELOPE CONTRACTORS PLUS#
He said solutions PREPA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are considering for these hardest-to-reach customers are solar panels plus battery storage packs, with a small backup diesel generator. “In a few cases, we’re trying to identify right now it’s going to take to a long time to get power back, or in some cases it would cost so much that it might be worth the federal expenditure or the time,” Higgins said. The contractors are focused now on the hardest-hit, hardest-to-access areas in and around the mountains of Caguas and Arecibo in particular, located around the mountain range called La Cordillera Central. Catalina Carrasco, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps, told Bloomberg Environment.
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency and Army Corps team will continue its work in support of PREPA as the host-utility takes over final-mile restoration efforts,” Maj. companies, including Cobra Building Envelope Contractors, which is currently on the island. Higgins said PREPA is completing its own six-month contracts with other U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ emergency restoration mission ends May 18, and it will demobilize the remaining contractors it has employed. That represents 1.74 percent of total customers. Separately, Higgins said it will likely take one or two more months to complete electricity restoration to remaining 25,678 PREPA metered customers still without power following Hurricanes Irma and Maria. It could take a couple of years for the leasing model for transmission and development to be finished. He didn’t name any utilities in line to buy the power plants, but a request for proposals on those sales could come in 12 to 18 months. The governing board of PREPA will be the first to decide the privatization model and to which entities it will sell the 5,830 megawatts of generation it owns, Higgins said. I think my job is to get PREPA to be as well-run as possible as a utility, and set up as much as possible to facilitate the next step, whatever the next step might be,” Higgins said. “I don’t see my job being to pick, or to say a certain company or way of doing things is the right way to do it. The plan would include selling its power plants and leasing its transmission and distribution system to private companies, as Puerto Rico Gov. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority will make a decision on how it will privatize the public utility within 18 months, CEO Walter Higgins told Bloomberg Environment in a May 4 interview.
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