Puerto Rico Imperatives to Enact Energy and Climate Justice

Relief funding from the U.S. government eventually reached Puerto Rico, but not without significant controversy. It took until three years after the hurricanes for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to allocate the largest amount of public assistance funds to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority for electric system work. Then, in September 2022, Hurricane Fiona, a tropical storm and a low-grade hurricane, hit the tip of southwestern Puerto Rico and caused massive flooding in the southern part of the archipelago. Again, community members and journalists reported more climate disaster deaths.

Presently, power outages in Puerto Rico are a recurring problem and are compounded by voltage fluctuations that routinely damage household appliances and critical hospital equipment. These climate disasters potently elucidate that the over-heated waters surrounding the archipelago are propelling frequent extreme weather events that negatively impact the people of the archipelago.

As in 2017 and before, poor and largely Afro-descendent communities are still overburdened by multifaceted polluting fossil-fired power plants. These facilities include the energy company AES Puerto Rico’s coal-fired power plant in Guayama and the Aguirre Power Complex in nearby Salinas. Both toxic polluters are in southeastern Puerto Rico, a sacrifice zone burdened with environmental injustice and racism. Often, residents of these sacrifice zones carry the vestiges of overburdening even if they relocate to other places.

Despite increasing climate disasters, system-wide energy failures, and environmental injustices, the bulk of disaster recovery funds ($17 billion from FEMA and $1.9 billion from the Community Development Blocks Grant of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) are slated to rebuild the same centralized transmission and distribution grid and the fossil-fired power plants. This plan fails to meet the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements that major federal investments consider reasonable alternatives. It also fails to properly frame the purpose and need of the work proposed and does not account for 2018 legislation that authorizes the use of FEMA funds beyond rebuilding infrastructure as it was before the disaster.

Examining Policy and Unethical Energy Schemes

Initially, FEMA prepared an environmental assessment (FEMA Utilities PEA) with little opportunity for meaningful public participation. The document presented a superficial environmental analysis that failed to consider the overburdening of environmental justice communities. Later, in June 2021, FEMA issued a finding of no significant impact for the wholesale rebuild of the electric grid throughout the archipelago, including some relocation of energy infrastructure and impacts to the only tropical rainforest under U.S. jurisdiction. The agency did not draft an environmental impact statement, a requirement of NEPA, and lacked adequate prior and informed consent from already overburdened communities. The failure to include important alternatives, such as distributed renewable energy and storage, energy literacy, efficiency, and community empowerment, denies the prime imperative to achieve the transformation of the archipelago’s electric system. Consideration of these reasonable alternatives is necessary to serve the public interest and attain energy and climate justice, security, and independence. This transformation would also facilitate access to clean, safe, and healthy environments, NEPA compliance, implementation of environmental justice executive orders, and address the climate crisis.

Instead, disaster recovery funds have been placed under the control of a joint venture created by Quanta Services and ATCO Canadian Utilities called LUMA Energy, which now operates the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) transmission and distribution systems. As an example, LUMA was awarded $1.2 billion for “vegetation management,” which entails massive deforestation of Puerto Rico’s tropical forests. The destructive efforts of this neoliberal privatization venture abound. Recovery funds are financing an electric system takeover that gravely threatens Puerto Ricans’ ongoing self-determination efforts that aim to transform electric and people power.

Puerto Rico’s ample sunshine and abundant rooftop resources make distributed renewable energy, primarily rooftop solar coupled with battery energy storage systems and energy efficiency, conservation, and education, vital alternatives. More economically privileged residents acquire or lease rooftop solar systems with batteries at a rate that currently surpasses 110,000 net-metered installations. Unfortunately, most “ratepayers” cannot afford the egregious prices that large private solar companies are charging for these systems. This arrangement has set up two separate and unequal electric systems that raise serious equity concerns, as well as alarm over the poor’s right to electricity. Energy poverty is widespread, with studies estimating that around 43 percent of the archipelago’s residents live in poverty, including over 56 percent of children. Even when the power flows, the electric rates are prohibitively high, which imposes a significant energy-cost burden. This situation is threatening to worsen with the impending rate hikes stemming from the restructuring of the PREPA debt, a result of the emergency management-like process enacted under the Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act, passed by Congress in 2016.

Puerto Rico has an ambitious, legally mandated renewable energy standard enacted by its legislative branch. Renewables must contribute 40 percent of energy generation by 2025. The archipelago is nowhere near reaching that requirement, with just 3 to 6 percent renewable generation in 2023, depending on whether rooftop solar by private residents is counted. Another missed imperative occurred earlier this year when the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau and the Financial Oversight Management Board approved an amendment to the power purchase and operation agreement between PREPA and AES to pay the coal-fired power plant an extra $200 million rather than investing in alternative energy necessities. That amount is in addition to approximately $300 million per year under the original agreement to continue to operate and generate toxic and radioactive coal ash waste.

In the years-long negotiation process leading up to the approval of the increased payments to AES, the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau never once considered investing these hefty amounts in reasonable energy-generating alternatives, such as equipping large public electric energy consumers, including water infrastructure installations and other public facilities, with onsite solar and storage. Alternatives should include stepping up the implementation of distributed renewable energy to more residents in a way that would flip the current ratio of roughly 10 to 1 expenditure to maintain the centralized, fossil-fired, and import-dependent electric system. The existing system excludes and renders most people, businesses, and institutions passive as producers, “prosumers,” and energy actors.

Another major missed imperative to achieve some measure of energy and climate justice in Puerto Rico involves the methane gas expansionism led by the fracked gas conglomerate New Fortress Energy and its affiliates. Genera PR now operates all the PREPA power plants, and NFEnergia, another New Fortress company, sells methane gas to PREPA. Shortly after Hurricane Maria, New Fortress came to Puerto Rico and secured a long-term contract for port access to San Juan Bay. Subsequently, the government of Puerto Rico issued a request for proposals for the conversion of diesel-fired electric generation units to burn methane gas and supply the gas for those units. Not surprisingly, as the only company with prearranged access to the port, New Fortress won the bid and proceeded to build a Liquified “Natural” Gas (LNG) import terminal without authorization from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). New Fortress failed to comply with Section 3 of the Natural Gas Act, and with the prodding of multiple community and environmental groups, FERC agreed and required New Fortress to file an after-the-fact application for authorization for the illegal LNG terminal.

In the wake of Hurricane Fiona in September 2022, Genera and New Fortress successfully advocated for FEMA to provide 350MW of “temporary” gas-fired electric generation units, purportedly to provide grid stability. The “federal family,” including the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, supported the scheme. FEMA has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, under the dubious auspices of Section 403 of the Stafford Act that pertains to essential assistance, to rent the gas-fired units from a company called Weston Solutions. This corporation is also part of the New Fortress conglomerate. Additionally, the federal agencies bought the fuel for these units from New Fortress. Subsequently, a full 18 months after Hurricane Fiona, in March 2024, FEMA agreed to grant PREPA 90 percent of the purchase price of the gas-fired units, reportedly $335 million, to buy the fossil generation on the condition that by December 2025, PREPA sell the units to a third party. This expectation does not necessarily imply that the gas-fired units will be shut down or removed.

Mobilizing for Energy and Climate Justice

The electric system in Puerto Rico is increasingly an example of separate and unequal access to electricity. Unjust divides exist between households that can afford self-generation through rooftop solar and storage and those who are forced to depend on the centralized, fossil-fired, import-dependent, profit-centered electric system. This segregated system has serious implications for life and viability in Puerto Rico. Environmental justice advocates must rally for a completely different framework that provides for Puerto Rico’s self-determination in energy production, distribution, deliberation, and decision-making that engages in direct democracy. The public utility and the Puerto Rico and U.S. governments must commit to using disaster recovery funding to provide universal access to distributed renewable energy systems to meet the need for energy as an essential public service.