The island must find replacement power fast, with the peak of hurricane season underway
The collapse of Power Expectations’ $5.9 billion emergency-generation contract isn’t just a fraud story. It’s a 400-megawatt hole in Puerto Rico’s plan to get through this hurricane season.
That is the consequence that should worry Puerto Ricans most, even as new documents released by the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) deepen an already sprawling scandal over how the contract was awarded in the first place.
The island’s power plants are unable to produce the total electricity needed to cover peak demand, a shortfall that creates ongoing service interruptions and leaves Puerto Rican households and businesses without power for much of the year.
The Power Expectations-led project at the Aguirre Power Plant was supposed to help close that gap. With the contract now revoked, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and the Energy Bureau must move fast, with such moves as accelerating repairs at struggling power plants, fast-tracking Genera PR’s 244 megawatts of new peaker units and battery storage facilities already under construction, and weighing a new expedited procurement to replace the capacity that was lost.
How the contract collapsed matters, because it explains why Puerto Rico is now racing to fill that gap. Newly released Oversight Board documents show just how close PREPA came to moving forward on a contract built on a forged signature and how many agencies had reason to know.
THE FORGED SIGNATURE
The Oversight Board revealed late Tuesday that it had obtained a previously undisclosed letter from ERock Inc. alleging that Power Expectations forged a signature to bind Enchanted Rock to the contract, after threatening the firm with a lawsuit unless it signed.
In a sharply worded communication to Energy Czar Josué Colón, Third-Party Procurement Office (3PPO) President Osvaldo Carlo, and PREPA Executive Director Mary Zapata, Oversight Board Executive Director Robert Mujica said the June 17 letter from ERock’s general counsel was never provided to the Board despite repeated requests for information.
The omission, he wrote, deprived the regulator of key evidence showing that the contract was executed using a fabricated identity, a fake email domain, and a signature attributed to a person ERock says “does not even exist.”
The June 17 letter is explosive. ERock states that Power Expectations “forged the signature of a non-existent person” posing as an Enchanted Rock representative, signing as “Jhoby Weaks, COO-Caribbean Operations,” using an email address at a domain ERock does not own. ERock says it repeatedly told Power Expectations, beginning in November 2025 and again in January and June 2026, that it would not sign the agreement. Instead, Power Expectations allegedly tried to pressure the company into signing by sending a fraudulent demand letter threatening $10 billion in damages, using the letterhead of a Miami law firm whose attorney later confirmed he had never represented Power Expectations.
A BREAKDOWN IN DISCLOSURE
The Oversight Board said the June 17 letter confirms that the procurement was compromised at its foundation. Enchanted Rock’s participation had been the central factor in qualifying the consortium, given that Power Expectations and Reyes Contractor lacked utility-scale experience and financial capacity. Without Enchanted Rock, the Board said, the consortium “no longer satisfies the qualification basis on which the Oversight Board approved the Contract.”
The letter also exposes a breakdown in disclosure across multiple agencies. ERock’s June 17 warning was sent to both the Public-Private Partnerships Authority (P3A) and 3PPO, yet neither entity provided the document to the Oversight Board. Instead, the procurement continued, and on June 12, two days after contract execution, Power Expectations transferred Enchanted Rock’s interest to Flotek Industries without PREPA’s consent and without notifying the Board.
PREPA did not learn of the assignment until July 9 and consented on July 31, unaware that ERock had already raised concerns about the forged signature weeks earlier.
The Oversight Board said it learned of the allegations only on August 7, when a media inquiry prompted ERock to confirm them publicly. “This letter was not included in the 3PPO and P3A responses to our previous RFIs,” Mujica wrote, adding that the Board’s August 17 revocation letter could not reference the document because it had been withheld.
The implications are significant. The Board’s letter suggests that, absent its intervention, PREPA would have proceeded with a $5.9 billion contract based on a forged signature, a misrepresented consortium, and a procurement record that concealed critical information from regulators.
The Board said the procurement was “fundamentally flawed” and that continuing the project would be “unconscionable,” given that no milestones had been met, the $1.18 billion performance bond was never delivered, and the project had made no progress 68 days after execution.
The fallout extends beyond Puerto Rico’s government. Flotek Industries, substituted into the contract without Oversight Board approval, was criticized by short-seller Wolfpack Research for failing to disclose the cancellation of a deal that represented more than half of its backlog. Flotek acknowledged the cancellation Tuesday.
With federal authorities now reviewing the matter, the Oversight Board’s latest disclosure adds new urgency to Puerto Rico’s search for alternative power. PREPA and the Energy Bureau must accelerate repairs at the San Juan and Palo Seco plants, both of which have struggled with recurring outages of their own, while fast-tracking Genera PR’s peaker and battery-storage buildout.
Whether that is enough to close a 400-megawatt gap before the next grid emergency is the question the scandal leaves unanswered.
