Puerto Rico’s energy future: distributed solar or centralized grid?

For decades, Puerto Ricans have struggled with a dysfunctional energy system. Now residents are grappling with two very different plans for how to fix it.

President Joe Biden’s administration invested heavily in distributed generation: rooftop solar and battery arrays on homes and businesses across Puerto Rico. But President Donald Trump has rolled back those commitments, redirecting funds toward hardening the grid and shoring up centralized — mostly fossil-fueled — power production.

Energy experts and community leaders say that continued reliance on fossil-fuel power plants is harmful and that sending electricity on transmission lines across rugged mountains plagued by hurricanes is impractical. Distributed generation, they argue, is the best way to supply Puerto Ricans with reliable, affordable power that can withstand natural disasters.

A federal judge’s Oct. 2 ruling on hurricane recovery funds offers a measure of hope to those advocating for this latter vision in the archipelago, which includes the main island and two smaller inhabited islands: Vieques and Culebra.

In September 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria battered Puerto Rico in quick succession, devastating homes and infrastructure and causing the lengthiest blackout in U.S. history, leaving some households without power for over a year. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is tasked with rebuilding the island’s energy infrastructure, which still has frequent outages. In 2020, the first Trump administration awarded $9.6 billion for this purpose, and other federal grants bring the pot of FEMA recovery funds for the energy system to over $12 billion.

In its 2020 grid-rebuilding study, FEMA proposed to fix and harden the existing grid and repair fossil-fuel plants. The agency made only cursory mention of distributed solar as supplemental power at critical facilities.

Community groups argued in official comments that instead of rebuilding a grid that has proved vulnerable to disaster, the agency should use federal funds for distributed solar paired with batteries. That would give homes, businesses, hospitals, and schools dependable power even when the grid goes down. FEMA did not incorporate that feedback into its final proposal in 2021, so in April 2023 the community groups, plus the national conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit alleging that FEMA had violated the law by failing to study the environmental impacts of its plan or to consider other alternatives.

Federal Judge Jay A. García-Gregory ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor this October, sending FEMA back to the drawing board to fully study the impacts of various grid-overhaul alternatives, including one based on distributed solar.

“This is a pretty good outcome, an order from a federal district judge requiring FEMA to consider distributed renewable energy for all of this historic amount of funding,” said Ruth Santiago, an environmental attorney who grew up and lives in Salinas, a coastal fishing town located near an oil-fired and a coal-burning power plant.

A closer look at the court case

Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), before undertaking any project that could significantly affect the ​“human environment,” a federal agency must release an environmental impact statement after studying the direct and indirect effects the project would have, as well as its cumulative effects with other existing or planned developments. The agency also must take a ​“hard look” at alternative ways to achieve the same goals.

FEMA argued that its grid-rebuilding plans would not have a significant impact, therefore an in-depth study wasn’t required.

But in their lawsuit, the community groups argued that the impact of FEMA’s rebuilding plans would indeed be massive, and that the agency failed ​“to engage in meaningful analysis of the environmental effects” of its rebuilding plans.

The judge agreed and ordered FEMA to study the impacts of its plans as well as the alternatives the community groups had proposed: rooftop solar, microgrids that can be disconnected from the main grid in case of a larger outage, and incentives for energy efficiency and power use at times of lower demand.

It’s a measured victory though: FEMA can appeal the decision, take months or years to do the study, and even ignore its own environmental impact statement, as the agency isn’t required to take any action based on its findings.

“If they do an environmental impact statement, it doesn’t mean they will adopt distributed renewable energy options,” said Alfredo Vivioni, a member of the board of directors of the community organization Frente Unido Pro-Defensa del Valle de Lajas (United Front for the Defense of the Lajas Valley), one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. ​“But at least it requires them to make a deeper evaluation of the variables.”

“When you have a president that says climate change is a hoax, this is going to be interesting,” Vivioni said. ​“It could also be sad. But you learn to fight and keep on going. You build stamina for this.”

Consequences of the status quo 

Rebuilding Puerto Rico’s electricity system is a challenge with very high stakes.

Advocates for distributed power warn that more fatalities are likely if residents aren’t equipped with solar and batteries to survive future natural disasters. Meanwhile, residents — particularly those on the south coast of the main island — suffer health effects from fossil-fuel generation, and the continued reliance on fossil fuels will contribute to the very climate change–related events that damage the grid and endanger electricity supply, as the community groups pointed out in their lawsuit.

Perpetuating the existing energy system would be an environmental injustice, they argue, since the coal and oil plants on the south coast are located amid some of the island’s poorest communities.

They point to studies showing it is possible to power Puerto Rico with distributed solar while phasing out centralized fossil-fuel plants.

The groups’ lawsuit cites a 2020 National Renewable Energy Laboratory report that found distributed solar could generate more power than the archipelago needs. And it notes that a 2021 Cambio PR and Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) study found that by 2035, operating a system relying on 75% distributed generation — including rooftop solar, batteries, and microgrids — would be less expensive than operating the current grid, measured in the price of energy per kilowatt-hour.