THE BOARD THAT oversees Puerto Rico’s finances has taken its most conspicuous step toward privatizing the island’s power grid, a long sought-after prize that has been put on a plate by Hurricane Maria.
The federally appointed control board announced that it intends to putthe Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or Prepa — the island’s sole, beleaguered power utility — under the direction of an emergency manager.
That manager will be Noel Zamot, who will become Prepa’s “chief transformation officer.” Zamot, who is Puerto Rican, is a known entity to the control board. It appointed him this summer to serve on its executive committee as the revitalization coordinator. His role mainly involved attracting private investment under Title V of PROMESA, a provision allowing for an expedited social and environmental review of major infrastructure projects. Since that time, he’s been in charge of something called the Critical Projects Process, soliciting proposals from a slew of private actors. As of mid-September, Zamot had fielded 12 proposals according to his Twitter, many of which have to do with energy infrastructure.
His first job will be to help return electricity to around 80 percent of Puerto Ricans still without power following the storm. His second could be turning that power over to private hands, a pattern described by The Intercept’s Naomi Klein as the “shock doctrine.”
Months before either hurricanes Maria or Irma struck, the board had been enthusiastic about the prospect of privatizing Prepa, which is $9 billion in debt. Oversight board chair José B. Carrión III was explicit about one of Zamot’s main goals shortly after he was brought on: to “privatize the Electric Power Authority as soon as possible,” as he told the Puerto Rican newspaper Metro at the end of August.
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