Solutions for the Energy Transformation for Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 

The 2025 IRP represents a critical milestone in Puerto Rico’s ongoing journey toward a more sustainable, resilient, and cost-effective energy future. Developed under Regulation 9021 and led by LUMA Energy, the 2025 IRP serves as a comprehensive, data-driven roadmap designed to guide the Island’s energy development over the next two decades toward a system that can reliably and sustainably meet the energy demand and capacity needs of the island, while aligning with public policy objectives and regulatory mandates. 

The 2025 IRP ensures that Puerto Rico’s evolving electric system meets both current and future needs. This and subsequent IRPs include a five-year action plan that will allow the Energy Bureau and the local government to determine which energy resource projects to implement in the near and long term. While it evaluates energy needs throughout two decades, LUMA is mandated to update the IRP every three years to adjust it to the period in which the analysis is being conducted. 

It’s important to remember that LUMA’s role is to be an objective planner and author of the IRP, using sophisticated analyses and modeling to recommend the optimal plan for Puerto Rico, and to act as an advisor to the Energy Bureau and key stakeholders. As the operator of Puerto Rico’s T&D system, LUMA does not hold primary responsibility for the implementation of future energy resource projects, nor does it own or operate generation assets, but plays a pivotal role in enabling the interconnection of energy resources, and is responsible for preparing, presenting, and defending both current and future IRPs. 

The 2025 IRP is guided by six principal objectives: 

1. Prioritizing customer affordability by reducing nominal energy supply costs.
2. Achieving compliance with the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS).
3. Building a cleaner energy future by reducing carbon emissions. 
4. Optimizing technology diversity.
5. Enabling decentralized generation. 
6. Reducing the impact of outages for our customers by achieving industry-standard reliability, as measured by the Loss of Load Expectation (LOLE).

A Collaborative Effort 

Since 2022, LUMA has been committed to maintaining transparency and communication with the Energy Bureau and stakeholders to develop a realistic and pragmatic IRP that adheres to industry standards and reflects accurate, comprehensive data and the future energy needs and priorities of LUMA’s customers as Puerto Rico moves toward achieving a more reliable, more resilient, and cleaner energy system. Notably, in developing the 2025 IRP LUMA prioritized stakeholder engagement through the Solutions for the Energy Transformation of Puerto Rico (SETPR) initiative, a collaborative process that was designed to engage with a broad variety of customers and stakeholders and gain their input regarding Puerto Rico’s energy future to help ensure that the final 2025 IRP incorporates broad stakeholder priorities. In total, this process included 30 public meetings attended by 263 stakeholders. 

In addition to the critical public meetings held across the island, the IRP development process required extensive data collection, sophisticated modeling, and in-depth risk analysis. With the rapid growth of inverter-based renewable resources such as solar and wind energy, and the increasing role of customer-controlled assets like demand response (DR) and distributed solar (DPV), LUMA incorporated probabilistic methods and risk metrics to evaluate variability and flexibility within the system. Although it involves economic studies in its forecasts, financial analyses are outside the 2025 IPR’s scope. Therefore, discussions on identifying funding for new generation technologies are not covered within this Report.