Federal Energy Policy Is Deepening Puerto Rico’s Power Divide

In Viejo San Juan, the power goes out so often that when it happens now, it is not uncommon to hear people in the neighborhood break into cheers. No one is celebrating the darkness or the prospect of another long, hot night without air conditioning or fans. But blackouts have become an unpleasant routine.

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Puerto Rico’s power grid is overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. Despite billions of dollars allocated for reconstruction and improvements in generation capacity, it is still fragile and prone to failure, and efforts to modernize it have moved slowly. Between 2021 and 2024, each household lost electricity an average of 19 times a year and spent nearly 27 hours without power, while paying roughly $0.28 per kilowatt-hour ranking fourth in electricity prices among U.S. states, behind Hawaii, California, and Connecticut, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

As a result, many Puerto Ricans have been forced to buy generators. Those who can afford it have turned to solar energy. Under the Biden administration, federal climate programs, including funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and FEMA’s hazard mitigation initiatives, expanded incentives for rooftop solar and battery storage in disaster-prone places like Puerto Rico. These efforts included grants, rebates, and low- or no-cost installations through programs such as Programa Acceso Solar.

Rooftop solar offered energy independence, but Washington pulled back

In 2022, Congress created the $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund to support renewable infrastructure and the archipelago’s goal of meeting 100% of its electricity needs with renewable energy by 2050. Demand quickly outpaced supply, with tens of thousands of households installing solar systems to escape an unreliable grid. 

An estimated 163,000 Puerto Rican households now pursue some form of energy independence, many through private loans, others through federal programs that supported rooftop solar and battery storage for vulnerable residents, including public housing and community health clinics, but those federal programs got gutted by the Trump administration.

These programs mattered not only because they expanded access to renewable energy, but because they offered a measure of stability in a place where daily life has become precarious. Rooftop solar and battery systems gave families some control over electricity in a territory long accustomed to outages and uncertainty.

When the power fails, businesses close, employees lose wages, and spoiled inventory piles up. Restaurants, grocery stores, and homes discard food. For small businesses operating on thin margins, even a single prolonged outage can mean significant financial losses and, in some cases, layoffs or permanent closure. Medications that require refrigeration, such as insulin, are put at risk, a serious concern in a place where roughly two in 10 adults live with diabetes and depend on cool storage for their health and well-being.

Even so, Puerto Ricans remain subject to Washington’s shifting priorities, while federal agencies continue to invest in resilient, renewable systems for their own operations on the archipelago.

Nowhere is that contrast clearer than in the management of Puerto Rico’s power grid. In 2021, LUMA Energy, a private company, took over the archipelago’s transmission and distribution system. Tasked with maintaining and modernizing the grid and accelerating the transition to renewables, LUMA has overseen a system in which only about 7% of electricity comes from clean sources, even as outages and rates have increased.

The company operates under the authority of Puerto Rico’s Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected body imposed by Congress in 2016. Late last year, that same board approved a multi-year natural gas supply contract with New Fortress Energy, a company that has warned of bankruptcy, yet received a $4 billion contract from the Puerto Rican government.

At the same time, federal agencies are building the kind of resilient, renewable infrastructure that local communities have struggled to access. On Mona Island, an uninhabited wildlife reserve off Puerto Rico’s western coast, the Department of Homeland Security is replacing a deteriorating communications system with a solar-powered, hurricane-rated array and telecommunications tower. The project includes prefabricated shelters and a reinforced tower designed to withstand winds of up to 125 miles per hour. Planning documents specify that the system will be fully powered by renewable energy to ensure reliability.

A similar logic shapes redevelopment plans at Roosevelt Roads, the reopened Navy base on Puerto Rico’s southeast coast. In 2021, federal officials announced plans to expand the archipelago’s “blue economy,” including a Marine Business, Research, and Innovation Center in Ceiba. While the broader vision included renewable energy and grid upgrades, most large-scale initiatives remain stalled, but projects linked to federal or military uses move forward.

Renewable energy for the federal government, rolling blackouts for Puerto Ricans

In this second Trump administration, Washington has blocked hundreds of millions of dollars intended for rooftop solar and battery storage for Puerto Rican households, canceled clean-energy funding, and backed contracts that tether Puerto Rico to imported natural gas through financially unstable corporations. The result is a two-tiered energy regime: renewable resilience for federal needs; rolling blackouts, rising rates, and uncertainty for Puerto Rican residents.

This pattern has deepened under the Financial Oversight and Management Board’s tenure. Created in the name of fiscal discipline, the board has exercised sweeping authority over Puerto Rico’s budget and energy policy, often aligning its decisions with corporate and utility interests. Since LUMA took control of the grid, higher rates, more frequent outages, and growing public distrust have become the norm, even as the board shields the contract from sustained public scrutiny.

On Mona Island, federal agencies have concluded that the island’s older solar system is insufficient for current needs. Rather than patch it, they are rebuilding the entire system with modern renewable technology: solar arrays, battery shelters, buried conduits, and a self-supporting tower designed to function for decades. The project involves barge deliveries, helicopter airlifts, and long-term maintenance plans, the kind of durable investment Puerto Rico’s public grid has yet to receive.

The federal government knows what energy resilience requires: redundancy, decentralized renewable generation, and infrastructure that does not depend on a brittle, centralized grid. It is willing to fund that model when federal operations depend on it.

For Puerto Ricans, the consequences are lived daily. Our food spoils. Medical equipment malfunctions without power. Schools and clinics run on generators. Without reliable air conditioning, we are exposed to dangerous heat levels. 

More than seven years after Hurricane Maria, FEMA still cannot say when the grid will be fully rebuilt. Billions approved by Congress remain unspent, while the archipelago’s legally mandated transition to renewable energy continues to lag.

After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico faced a choice: Rebuild the grid as it was, or use the crisis to build something more resilient and democratic. The path taken has favored centralized control, fossil-fuel dependence, and corporate contracts over community stability. Renewable energy, when it arrives, remains uneven and shaped by federal priorities rather than local needs.

Until Puerto Rico is allowed to decide how its energy is produced, who profits from it, and how it is governed, the archipelago will remain trapped in a system that reproduces vulnerability instead of resilience. 

For now, Puerto Ricans are left to adapt to the dark, even as the lights stay on for those who control the system.