The Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority has contracted Maryland-based Envocore to carry out field deployment and program management for its island-wide water meter modernization program, under a five-year agreement valued at about $129 million announced on 2 September 2026. The scope covers replacement of roughly 1.5 million meters with ultrasonic units and installation of advanced metering infrastructure endpoints across all 78 municipalities. The award lands while more than half a million residents remain under rotating water rationing and while the wider metering program faces open questions from federal and fiscal oversight officials.
Installation Labour Becomes The Program’s Binding Constraint
Envocore’s role is explicitly operational rather than technological. Power Sustainable, the Montreal-based asset manager that acquired a stake in the company in January 2026, said Envocore will supply the field deployment and program management capability needed to execute across the island.
That division of labour matters. Large advanced metering infrastructure programs rarely fail on hardware; they slip on crew availability, customer access to meter pits, and the sequencing of billing system cutover.
“We are honoured to partner with PRASA on the execution of this important initiative,” said Francis Wheeler, Chief Executive Officer of Envocore, in the Power Sustainable press release issued through PR Newswire on 2 September 2026.
A Program Financed By Post-María Disaster Recovery Money
The metering initiative is not funded from PRASA’s operating budget. According to a June 2026 letter from Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández, the Smart Metering Initiative is financed entirely through federal disaster recovery channels, combining Federal Emergency Management Agency obligations and Community Development Block Grant Mitigation funds under capital improvement code 6009102.
The letter states that FEMA awarded PRASA more than $580 million after Hurricane María to replace close to 1.4 million mechanical meters with ultrasonic units carrying AMI communications. That figure sets the outer financial envelope within which the Envocore contract sits.
The Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico has treated accurate metering as a core fiscal measure for years, on the reasoning that commercial losses from faulty meters and unbilled consumption are directly recoverable revenue.
Three Award Attempts And A Court Of Appeals Reversal
The procurement history behind the program is unusually contested. PRASA issued the underlying request for proposals in January 2022, and the oversight board conditionally approved parallel pilot contracts with Distribution Control Systems Caribe and Utility Metering Solutions in November 2023, structured as a pilot phase followed by full deployment.
Hernández’s letter records that PRASA awarded the full deployment contract to Utility Metering Solutions in October 2024, rescinded it a week later without public explanation, then re-awarded it on 6 December 2024 at $407,930,646. The oversight board subsequently noted that no calculation had been supplied to justify that price.
Distribution Control Systems Caribe challenged the process, and the Puerto Rico Court of Appeals ruled in May 2025 that PRASA had not adequately justified its selection, with further appellate proceedings continuing into February 2026. Neither PRASA nor Envocore has publicly described how the new $129 million deployment contract relates to that prime award.
How The Envocore Award Sits Alongside The Badger Meter Supply Deal
The metering hardware for the program was contracted separately. Badger Meter announced in January 2026 that PRASA had selected its cellular AMI stack of E-Series ultrasonic meters, ORION cellular endpoints and BEACON software, describing the arrangement as supply-only with no prime contractor or installation responsibility, as covered in earlier reporting on the award.
Envocore therefore appears to fill the execution gap Badger Meter explicitly declined. Bluefield Research characterised the Badger award as the company’s largest metering contract to date, covering 1.6 million cellular-enabled meters over five years.
The connection counts published by the three parties do not align. FEMA documentation references nearly 1.4 million meters, Badger Meter cites approximately 1.6 million service connections, and the Envocore announcement uses roughly 1.5 million, a spread of some 200,000 endpoints that neither PRASA nor its contractors have reconciled publicly.
Drought And Rationing Have Changed The Political Stakes
The contract was signed into an active emergency. Governor Jenniffer González declared a state of emergency on 31 July 2026 as reservoir levels fell, and PRASA imposed a 48 hours on, 48 hours off rotation in early August for customers served by the Carraízo reservoir.
Seven of the island’s most populous municipalities, including San Juan, Carolina and Trujillo Alto, were affected, with more than 500,000 people under rationing according to Yale Climate Connections. Rainfall in early September eased conditions modestly without changing the rationing pattern.
Against that backdrop, PRASA’s own estimate that around 65 percent of produced water is lost or unbilled has become politically charged rather than merely technical. CNN reported in late August that residents and academics increasingly frame the shortage as an infrastructure failure compounded by drought rather than a weather event alone.
The Unit Economics Are Thin On Detail
At $129 million across roughly 1.5 million meters, the contract averages about $86 per connection. That arithmetic, noted by News is My Business, does not separate labour from meters, endpoints, communications or software, and the Envocore scope appears to exclude the hardware already contracted to Badger Meter.
For comparison, United Utilities in England awarded a single prime contract valued at £630 million excluding VAT for more than 900,000 smart AMI meters covering supply, installation and connectivity over a five-year period. The two figures are not directly comparable, since the British contract bundles hardware and comms that Puerto Rico has procured separately, but the gap illustrates how much of a program’s cost sits outside the installation line.
Neither PRASA nor Envocore has published a target for non-revenue water reduction, an estimate of incremental billed revenue, or a payback calculation against the program’s federal cost.
What Remains Undisclosed
PRASA has not released an installation timetable beyond the five-year contract term, has not identified which municipalities are sequenced first, and did not respond to press inquiries about the contract scope in the week the award was announced.
The utility has also not published the number or value of competing bids for the deployment work, nor confirmed publicly which manufacturer’s meters will be installed under the Envocore contract. For a program funded entirely by federal recovery dollars and already subject to congressional questioning, those disclosure gaps are likely to remain the central friction point through the deployment period.
