Puerto Rico's governor escalates her drive to push LUMA off the grid

Jenniffer Gonzalez Colon rejected the utility's new rate-increase request and said she wants another operator, as contract fights sit before the island's top court.

SAN JUAN. Puerto Rico's governor has sharpened her campaign against the private company that runs the island's electricity grid. Speaking at the Caribe Hilton on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, Governor Jenniffer Gonzalez Colon rejected a new rate-increase request that LUMA Energy has filed with the Negociado de Energia, the island's energy bureau, and said plainly that the company should not remain the operator of Puerto Rico's transmission and distribution system, Metro Puerto Rico reported.

"Me parece una barbaridad," the governor said, calling the request outrageous. She returned to the theme of cost without service. "Esto es aumento, aumento, aumento y, sin embargo, no estan haciendo el trabajo," she said, which translates as increase, increase, increase, and yet they are not doing the job. She accused the company of trying to pass more than administrative costs on to the public: "Ellos le quieren pasar mas que los costos administrativos al pueblo de Puerto Rico."

LUMA has operated the transmission and distribution network since 2021 under a contract that has been contentious from the start, through chronic outages, a slow federal-funded rebuild of a grid wrecked by Hurricane Maria, and repeated political fights over who should run it. Gonzalez Colon said her administration wants to replace LUMA with a different private operator, and she pointed to the energy bureau's own report on a 2025 blackout, which linked maintenance failures, including rodents in substations, to the outage.

The legal ground is unsettled. The governor noted that challenges over LUMA's contract are before the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, which means the political drive to replace the operator is running in parallel with a judicial process that could constrain how, and how quickly, any change happens. Removing a contracted operator mid-stream is rarely simple, and rarely cheap, and the court's eventual word will shape the governor's room to maneuver.

What the governor did not provide, in this account, was a figure. The size of LUMA's new rate-increase request, in dollars or as a percentage, was not stated, and the Ledger will not borrow one from LUMA's older filings to fill the gap. What is clear is the politics.

For Puerto Rican households and businesses, electricity has been the island's most reliable source of frustration for a decade, expensive, unreliable, and tangled in contracts and federal money. The grid has never fully recovered from Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the slow, federally funded rebuild has become a grievance in its own right, fuel for every candidate who promises to fix it. A governor who stands at a podium and says the operator should go is channeling a genuine and durable public anger. Whether she can act on it depends less on the podium than on the Supreme Court, and on whether another operator can be found who would do the job she says LUMA is not.