Puerto Rico's democracy, bankruptcy, and the grid that could teach the mainland how to heal
By a regulated optimist who grades in pencil, votes with both hands, and still believes maps should tell the truth.
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I. An island that keeps the republic honest
If you want to see the United States without makeup, fly to San Juan and wait for the lights to flicker. In that twitch you can read the whole civics lesson: a people who are citizens without a presidential ballot, a public utility in bankruptcy supervised by a federal board many call colonial, a private grid operator everyone blames on the days it is easy, and a solar movement that behaves like a patient, stubborn river—quiet, persistent, cutting channels where the levees forgot to plan. Puerto Rico is not a metaphor; it is the most candid chapter of American governance.
The point of this essay is plain: if the United States wants a reliable, decarbonized, and just electricity system, it should learn from the island it keeps forgetting is a mirror.
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II. The law already pointed to the sun
In 2019, Puerto Rico enacted the Energy Public Policy Act (Act 17-2019), with targets that are almost embarrassingly clear: 40% renewables by 2025, 60% by 2040, and 100% by 2050; coal is being phased out. The statute is not a poster—it is a binding RPS with interconnection and distributed-generation marching orders.
The federal technical verdict followed: the PR100 study—two years of modeling and stakeholder work from DOE's national labs—concludes that 100% renewable electricity by 2050 is feasible if the island invests in grid upgrades and actually listens to communities. That is not climate romance; it's math with transformers.
Billions of federal dollars have been pledged for grid recovery since Maria—FEMA obligations in the double digits of billions—and Congress created a $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund to seed rooftop solar + batteries for low-income households and community sites.
And yet: in October 2025 DOE reallocated $365 million from that solar resilience pot to rush near-term fixes on the brittle grid, triggering an island-wide argument over whether triage should come before transformation. Supporters say reliability can't wait; critics call it a raid on the future. Both are right about the urgency; only one fixes tomorrow.
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III. Operators, acronyms, and the day the island went dark
Transmission and distribution are run by LUMA Energy, which took control June 1, 2021 under a longterm O&M deal; generation is operated under a 2023 O&M agreement by Genera PR. In April 2025, Puerto Rico suffered an island-wide blackout; LUMA and Genera traded explanations while crews restarted units and cleared vegetation that had encroached on a transmission corridor. Restoration took days; public patience, minutes.
Regulators have started forcing daylight into the numbers. The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau ordered monthly SAIDI/SAIFI reporting from LUMA in 2025; LUMA touts reliability gains, while investigative journalists and consumer suits highlight persistent outages and rejected damage claims. Both can be true: a grid can improve from terrible to merely bad, and still fail dignity tests.
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IV. The bankruptcy that owns the present tense
The electric utility PREPA remains in Title III restructuring under PROMESA, the 2016 federal law that created the island's Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). Plans and counter-plans have circled for years; court rulings in 2024–25 narrowed creditor claims and kept the case alive. The Oversight Board says its proposal would cut legacy debt by ~80%, to about $2.6 billion (pensions aside). The price of a decade of mistakes is being carved into future rates; island households can feel the chisel.
As if to prove that institutions are fragile even when made of statute, the White House fired most FOMB members in August 2025; a federal judge blocked some of the removals in October for lack of cause and due process. The island's hardest technical docket—the PREPA plan—now sits inside a separation-of-powers seminar. Reliability hates this kind of drama.
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V. Democracy in partial color
The most under-reported sentence in mainland media is simple: U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico cannot vote for president and lack voting representation in Congress. They can vote in primaries; they can influence national politics through diaspora families; but on election night the island is a silence. That is not an appeal to pity; it is a statement about incentives and salience—what doesn't vote rarely gets line-item urgency.
Island voters have told Washington what they want, if not with a single voice then with stubborn repetition. Plebiscites in 2012, 2017, and 2020 sought clarity; the 2020 referendum favored statehood on a yes/no question, while the 2017 vote—boycotted by opposition parties—delivered a lopsided but low-turnout "sí." In 2022, the House passed the Puerto Rico Status Act (H.R. 8393) to require a binding, non-territorial choice; the bill stalled in the Senate. Status is destiny in the Caribbean, and Congress keeps hitting snooze.
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VI. The solar-punk republic that already exists in miniature
If you want a different ending, go to Adjuntas. Casa Pueblo—an institution that feels half lab, half parish—stood up the island's first community-owned urban solar microgrid and now links multiple microgrids through a new community energy lab. Panels and batteries kept medicines cold and sirens alive when the macro-grid quit. The model is not charity; it is governance at human scale.
Policy blueprints exist. Queremos Sol, a coalition of engineers, advocates, and community groups, has shown—with studies and open models—how distributed rooftop solar + storage could shoulder essential household loads, cut bills, and defang hurricanes. This is not a meme; it is a feasible system design that complements utility-scale renewables rather than romanticizing candles.
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VII. What good looks like (and how fast you can build it)
1) Make Act 17 real.
Treat the 40% by 2025 target as a retrofit sprint: fast-track interconnections, standardize power-purchase contracts, and publish a public queue dashboard so projects move in months, not lost years. If you don't measure the queue, you are not serious about the target.
2) Lock PR100 into budgets.
PR100's scenarios should graduate from reports to annual implementation memos: feeder hardening schedules, storage milestones, and a procurement calendar that mixes utility-scale solar with rooftop + community microgrids (especially for clinics and elder housing). Treat that as reliability infrastructure, not green décor.
3) Put the $1 billion PR-ERF and FEMA billions on the same map.
A single public ledger showing who gets what, where, by when—and in which language—would do more for trust than any press conference. If DOE must divert some money (the $365 million reallocation) to keep hospitals from going dark, promise the next tranche is locked for distributed systems with signed timelines. Reliability and dignity are not rivals.
4) Regulate translation as if lives depend on it—because they do.
Outage and restoration notices, easement notices, and compensation claims must be bilingual by default with staffed hotlines. (The litigation docket tells you what happens when bureaucracy pretends English-only is enough.)
5) Publish outage math like a weather report.
Monthly SAIDI/SAIFI by feeder, in public, with comparisons to U.S. medians. The island's debate will get cleaner when numbers are boringly legible.
6) Finish the bankruptcy without making electricity a luxury good.
Any PREPA plan that wins in court but pushes rates beyond what households can swallow will lose in reality. The court record shows creditor claims that would drown a transition; use the Board's own framing—~80% haircut—as a guardrail for affordability and fuel the savings into wires and storage, not imported diesel.
7) Let communities build the redundancy we keep promising.
Scale Casa Pueblo-style microgrids: a 500-site program for clinics, schools, small groceries, pump stations, and cooling centers, financed with a mix of PR-ERF, FEMA mitigation, and green banks. Require open performance data so skeptics can audit in real time.
8) Decolonize the docket design.
Hearings that decide right-of-way and tariff design should run in Spanish and English, with childcare stipends and evening sessions. A grid is a social contract before it is a line diagram.
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VIII. Three scenes (policy as a place)
San Sebastián, noon.
A clinic's inverter ticks from grid to battery; the nurse does not look up. She trusts the panels because she watched them go in, and the grant paperwork was in her language. The hurricane is three hours away and she is not afraid.
Bayamón, 6:20 p.m.
A shop owner taps a public dashboard and sees that her feeder's SAIDI has fallen for three straight months. She believes the number because the regulator posts the raw files as well as the charts. Tomorrow she'll buy a new refrigerator—one more vote of confidence.
Adjuntas, twilight.
The plaza lights up from a microgrid named for independence—not from anyone, but from fragility. A band starts. In some other town, the utility-scale farm turns west like a field of clocks. The republic is not one architecture; it is a duet that keeps the music on.
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IX. The politics we keep postponing
Congress knows how to let the island choose a non-territorial future; it wrote the bill (H.R. 8393) and then let it die with plausible shrugs. Meanwhile, the island's citizens remain disenfranchised at the federal level, an awkwardness that corrodes urgency on everything from grid funding to Medicaid parity. To govern Puerto Rico as if it were foreign and bill it as if it were family is a moral geometry that no seventh-grader would defend on a whiteboard.
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X. Epilogue: a better definition of reliability
Reliability is not megawatts; it is mothers who stop counting insulin vials in the dark. Affordability is not a number on a regulator's PDF; it is the hour a small bakery can keep ovens on without losing rent. Sovereignty is not a flag; it is a grid that tells the truth in two languages and a ballot that counts in one union.
Puerto Rico has already written the outline: law that points to the sun, science that says it can be done, communities that have done it at kitchen scale, and a ledger of federal funds fat enough to finish the job. What remains is the courtesy to stop calling the island exceptional when it is only early.
Turn the page, connect the roofs, harden the feeders, close the bankruptcy, and—at last—let a people vote on the form of the future they are already building.
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Sources (validated)
• Act 17-2019 renewable targets (40% by 2025; 60% by 2040; 100% by 2050); coal phase-out provisions.
• PR100 final report and DOE summaries: feasibility of 100% renewables by 2050 with required grid upgrades and community participation.
• Federal funding: FEMA's multibillion grid obligations; Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund ($1 billion) scope.
• DOE $365 million reallocation from PR-ERF to urgent grid fixes; public reaction and rationale.
• Operations: LUMA takeover June 1, 2021; Genera PR generation O&M (2023 agreement; 2024 transaction close); April 2025 island-wide blackout.
• Reliability oversight: PREB order for monthly SAIDI/SAIFI reporting (May–June 2025).
• Bankruptcy & FOMB: PROMESA background (CRS); PREPA plan framing (~80% debt reduction) and creditor-claim rulings (2024–25).
• FOMB firings and court blocks (Aug–Oct 2025).
• Voting rights & status: Territorial residents lack presidential vote and voting members of Congress; 2020 statehood referendum; H.R. 8393 (House-passed Puerto Rico Status Act, 12/15/2022).
• Community solutions: Casa Pueblo microgrid(s) and new community lab; Queremos Sol distributed solar + storage modeling.