Puerto Rico’s government has sued Luma Energy in the first legal step to cancel its multimillion-dollar contract with the private power company as the U.S. territory battles chronic outages, increases in power bills and the slow reconstruction of a grid razed by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
The lawsuit announced late Thursday comes more than five years after the government awarded a contract to Luma, a consortium made up of Calgary, Alberta-based Atco and Quanta Services Inc. of Houston. Luma, which took over the transmission and distribution of power in Puerto Rico in June 2021, inherited infrastructure that was crumbling after decades of neglect and mismanagement under Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority, which is struggling to restructure more than $9 billion in debt.
