Puerto Ricans spent the final hours of 2024 in darkness after a massive power-grid failure blacked out much of the island.
The cause of the latest blackout — a lamentably common feature of modern life on the island, even before the devastation wrought by 2017’s Hurricane Maria — is thought to be isolated to a catastrophic underground cable failure. But some have been quick to blame LUMA, the island’s primary utility provider, which took over Puerto Rico’s electricity grid after the island’s government-run power provider filed for bankruptcy in 2020.
Since so many of the critics of LUMA also freely concede that blackouts had become a “normal” occurrence even prior to 2020 owing to poor management of the island’s electricity utilities, the accusation is a little rich. Even if the venture is under-resourced, as some maintain, others are quick to note that the collapse of the island’s government-owned utility “hindered progress in strengthening and modernizing the island’s grid.”
By Wednesday afternoon, power had been restored to much of the island, but Puerto Rico’s power problems are not limited to delivery mechanisms alone. Power generation, too, routinely fails to meet demand.
Puerto Rico’s incoming Republican governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, believes the island’s power problems are attributable to its reliance on renewable-energy sources in accordance with a 2019 law that would require it to rely on green energy for 100 percent of its power by 2050. “I believe that we should diversify our energy basket,” González recently insisted. Indeed, “the situation is so bad that [it] risks the island’s pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturing sectors, which represent almost half the economy,” a Bloomberg report on the matter read.
Gonzalez says the targets are getting in the way of other, cheaper, forms of energy and have slowed the use of some $17 billion in federal aid.
“I’m willing to revise whatever legislation is available to secure power that dramatically reduces the outages we are suffering,” she said.
The governor’s embrace of hydrocarbons like liquid natural gas to fill the country’s power-generation gaps is a mere flesh wound, say advocates of a fossil-fuel-free future. “Renewable energy generation in Puerto Rico is now 9%, up from 2% to 3% before Hurricane Maria in 2017,” an analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis crowed, “with all growth due to individual households and businesses installing rooftop solar and storage.” That’s right: the bright spot in Puerto Rico’s experiment with green energy mandates is a law that creates financial incentives for individuals to install solar panels on their roofs.
With unambiguous victories so few and far between, the central planners must take what they can get.