Caribbean Matters: As long as Puerto Rico is a colony, blackouts will continue

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“Power,” in the Puerto Rican context, has currently been in the headlines again after the massive blackout there on New Year’s Eve. It is disheartening that the island seems to only get major mainland media attention when there is a disaster, like the most recent blackout, or when there is a hurricane or earthquake. This blackout was only one of many—though not all have been island-wide. Because the most recent one took place on a holiday, it got lots of media attention. The daily plight of islanders going without power, however, does not.

Puerto Rico, as a colony of the U.S., ultimately has zero power to control its own destiny. Though it elects its own governor and has a non-voting representative in the U.S. Congress, final decisions about the economy are made by a U.S. appointed governing board, the Financial Oversight and Management Board—which many islanders have dubbed ”La Junta de Control Fiscal,” or for short simply “La Junta.”

“Caribbean Matters” has repeatedly covered the power issue on the island, and protests against LUMA Energy. But as long as islanders don’t have the political power to remove the FOMB, revoke LUMA’s contract, and shift to other energy sources, the “apagones” will continue to be part of the way of life (and death) on the island.

As political anthropologist Dr. Yarimar Bonilla wrote for The New York Times in the wake of a massive blackout in  June 2024:

Puerto Rico Will Not Go Quietly Into the Dark

In 2020 the Puerto Rican government transferred management of the electric grid to a newly minted Canadian-American private company, Luma Energy. It promised to bring clean, reliable energy to Puerto Rico after the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority filed for bankruptcy and Hurricane Maria knocked out the island’s ailing electric grid.

[...]

Puerto Rico’s power authority is now a three-headed monster: Luma handles customer service, transmission, maintenance and repair; another company, Genera PR, takes care of energy generation; and PREPA remains responsible for compliance and the ongoing bankruptcy process.

To date, Luma has spent only a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for improvements. At this rate, it will take over a century to rebuild the grid — assuming no further disasters. Plus, under a new federal administration those allocated funds could easily disappear. The labyrinth of federal bureaucracy contributes to delays, but it’s only part of the story.

When Luma took over the electric grid, PREPA’s skilled line workers were forced into contracts with reduced benefits. Some were left with little choice but to transfer to jobs mopping floors or cutting grass for other public agencies. Luma replaced them with an inexperienced team led by executives who command extravagant salaries. They blame the island’s weather, vegetation, cats and iguanas for the constant outages.

During the most recent blackout, posts like this one on X raised the issue of U.S colonialism:

What most news organizations don’t deal with or report on is “power” in the Puerto Rican political context. Puerto Rico has a different political system than the mainland, with political parties that were initially organized around the status issue. Elections are not simply “Democrats vs. Republicans.”

Even though Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth, those living on the island cannot vote for president, like all U.S. “territories” (i.e colonies),  Their “delegates” can’t participate in major floor votes in the House of Representatives. During the vote for House speaker on Jan. 3, Del. Stacey Plaskett—the non-voting representative from the nearby colony of the U.S. Virgin Islands—called for change, noting that “This body and this nation [have] a territories and a colonies problem.”

It was good to hear the “c” word used.

It is difficult to understand the complexity of issues facing Puerto Rico without understanding the history of those problems. A documentary detailing that history,“Disempowered: Puerto Rico's Perfect Storm,” attempts to address that challenge.

As the film’s photographer, Roque Nonini writes:

Our film, “DisemPOWERed,” finds no “natural” disaster, but instead a “perfect storm” of debt crisis, corruption, manipulation by Big Oil and Wall Street, an electric utility that was bankrupt before Maria, and the burdens of colonialism that has left Puerto Rico with a dying economic model and a legacy of heavy oil dependence.

From the YouTube video notes:

In September 2017 Hurricane María wiped out Puerto Rico’s electric grid, plunging 3 million people into the worst blackout in US history.  Roughly 3,000 people died, and tens of thousands lived without power for nearly a year. A filmmaker and an anthropologist teamed up to tell the story of the root causes behind the longest blackout.

The disaster revealed modern society’s profound dependence on electricity – for water, food, healthcare, communication and economic life. Dis.em.POWER.ed  finds no “natural” disaster, but instead a “perfect storm” of debt, corruption, and manipulation by oil companies and Wall Street banks. The US territory ’s electric utility and government were bankrupt before the storm largely due to decisions made by federal politicians. The power imbalance of this fossil-colonialism left Puerto Rico with a legacy of heavy oil dependence and a dying economic model.  The struggle between a renewable future and one of fossil dependency continues to play out on the island.The film offers an important resource to students, educators and the general US public for whom both the politics of energy and the consequences of Puerto Rico’s territorial status are poorly understood.…

Sandy Smith-Nonini PhD is a former journalist who teaches anthropology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She does research on the relationship of energy and debt. Her publications can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/...

Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón, the newly elected, right-wing, statehood-supporting former head of Latinos For Trump, has issued statements of concern about the blackouts.

And as Dánica Coto reported for the Associated Press:

González, a Republican who backs President-elect Donald Trump and whose pro-statehood New Progressive Party secured a historic third consecutive term after she won the Nov. 5 election, has pledged to stabilize the Caribbean island’s crumbling power grid.

Before the start of a ceremony in front of Puerto Rico’s seaside Capitol to celebrate her swearing in, González attended Mass surrounded by family and supporters.

“What better than to come first to thank God and to ask God to give me the wisdom, the fortitude and the tools to fulfill everything I promised the people of Puerto Rico,” she told reporters.

[...]

Meanwhile, a growing number of protesters gathered at the Capitol before González’s arrival. Protesting the ceremony was Yara Humarán Martínez, an aquatic physical therapist whose 83-year-old mother remains without power.

“I don’t have any hope that she will change anything,” she said of the new governor.

González has promised to appoint an energy “czar” to review potential contractual breaches while another operator is found to possibly replace Luma Energy, a private company that oversees the transmission and distribution of power in Puerto Rico.

However, no contract can be canceled without prior approval from Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau and a federal control board that oversees the island’s finances.

As the AP reported, González announced the “energy czar” appointment Wednesday.

The nomination of Josué Colón comes days after a massive blackout hit the island, leaving nearly all its 3.2 million inhabitants in the dark as they prepared for New Year’s Eve.

“Right now, we’re in an emergency,” said Gov. Jenniffer González Colón. “Our electrical system is in such a precarious situation that anything can cause the power to go out.”

Josué Colón is currently the executive director of Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority but would step down if lawmakers approve his new position, which they’re expected to do in upcoming days. In his new role, he will supervise Genera PR, which oversees the generation of power on the island, and Luma Energy, which handles transmission and distribution

Environmental and energy activists on the island want Puerto Rico to move away from dependence on fossil fuels, and shift to solar and wind. That does not seem to be what Gonzalez has planned, as noted by Jim Wyss for Bloomberg News.

Puerto Rico New Governor Pivots to Gas to Fix Crumbling Grid

When Jenniffer Gonzalez takes over as Puerto Rico governor on Thursday she will have to navigate one of the biggest energy messes in the US. Her solution: Embrace fossil fuels.

[...]

Gonzalez’s proposals underscore a broader pushback against clean energy.

President elect Donald Trump promised to prioritize fossil fuel extraction and put an end to the “green new scam” of renewable energy policies set by his predecessor. Other US utilities have been scaling back their carbon reduction goals and delaying the retirement of coal plants.

While pushing for more natural gas, Gonzalez said she favors allowing individual solar customers to sell power back to the grid. The policy, called net-metering, has led to a boom in rooftop solar installations in Puerto Rico but it’s being challenged in court by the federal oversight board who runs the island’s finances.

“I am very much in favor of net-metering,” she said. “If you take away the only incentive people have, then nobody’s going to invest in solar energy.”

You can read more about the FOMB threat to net-metering here. An in “The Struggle for Energy Sovereignty in Puerto Rico’s Gubernatorial Elections,” Jaden Morales wrote for the North American Congress on Latin America:

Throughout her term as resident commissioner—Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in the U.S. House of Representatives—González-Colón has been a staunch supporter of using methane gas to fuel the archipelago’s electricity. In 2018, she proudly stood beside Republican representative Rob Bishop, then chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, as he relayed his plan to expand methane gas to transform Puerto Rico into “the energy hub of the entire Caribbean area.” This began to come to fruition when the U.S. supply chain company Crowley inaugurated a methane gas loading terminal in Peñuelas, Puerto Rico, in May 2022. González-Colón stated the terminal would boost the use of so-called transition fuels, such as methane gas. According to a 2021 report by the United Nations Environment Programme and Climate and Clean Air Coalition, however, over a 20-year period, methane gas is “80 times more potent at [global] warming than carbon dioxide.”

González-Colón’s bid, in league with LUMA and Genera PR, to expand the use of methane gas undermines the 2019 Puerto Rico Energy Public Policy Act, which mandated Puerto Rico receive 40 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2025 and 100 percent by 2050. In short, methane gas expansion threatens Puerto Rico’s renewable energy future. González-Colón’s campaign donors include Puerto Rico’s largest architecture firm Álvarez-Díaz & Villalón, contractors of the luxury tourist development Esencia in Cabo Rojo. This megaproject has received $497 million in tax exemptions from the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, including 100 percent in tax exemption on fossil fuels. Such financial incentives encourage these entities’ use of oil and hydrocarbon fuels like methane gas.

In my opinion, the mess that is Puerto Rico’s power system is a direct reflection of Puerto Rico’s inability to have power over its own destiny under its current colonial status. We shall see what the rise of the new political alliance on the island between the Puerto Rican Independence Party and the Citizens Victory Movement—called La Alianza, and whose second placegubernatorial candidate, Juan Dalmau, came in second in the governors race—portends for the future. According to the NACLA report, Dalmau presented

the most comprehensive vision to restore public control over Puerto Rico’s energy, promote a reliable and renewable energy transition, and address the political corruption and debt accumulation that helped facilitate the current energy crisis. The core feature of his proposal is the adoption of the self-sufficient and sustainable solar energy development plan laid out by Queremos Sol, a multi-sector coalition of scientific, labor, and environmental organizations working toward enhancing rooftop solar energy and an accelerated withdrawal of fossil fuels-based generation.

As of this writing, no data about how many current outages there are on the island were available, since LUMAs outage map wasn’t working. 

Join me in the comments for updates, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.