Keeping Power With the People: Puerto Ricos Energy Future
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1573 ... March 19, 2018
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Keeping Power With the People: Puerto Rico’s Energy Future
Sean Sweeney
Puerto Rico is now at the center of the global debate about climate resiliency, the potential of renewable energy technologies, and the best way to transition away from fossil fuels. To some extent, it has compressed the struggle for the world’s energy future both geographically and temporally. The whole system was shut down by an "extreme weather event" in the form of hurricane Maria that hit the island on September 16, 2017. This scale of disruption has never happened before -- not in Puerto Rico, not in the United States, and not anywhere in the modern world. What was once a discussion about the future of energy has now been transplanted firmly into the... precarious present.
Hurricane Maria completely knocked out Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, leaving the island without any power. As of this writing, four months have passed and still 45 per cent of the island’s population is without electricity. This is the longest power outage in U.S. history. By mid-January 2018, only 20 per cent of the island’s traffic lights were functioning. Of nearly 31,000 new utility poles ordered from the U.S., almost 19,000 had still not arrived. Hundreds of schools, while holding classes, were operating without electricity.
Puerto Rico’s Public Electric Power Authority (known as PREPA), which since the mid-1970s has provided virtually all of the island’s electrical power quickly became the target of an avalanche of criticism regarding how it responded to the disaster. These criticisms inflicted fresh damage on PREPA’s already sullied reputation for poor management, neglect of infrastructure, and deep indebtedness. PREPA was also criticized for dragging its feet on the development of wind and solar power. Puerto Rico has significant wind and considerable solar potential, but only 3.3 per cent of its pre-Maria power was generated by renewables. Oil generates 47.4 per cent of Puerto Rico’s power; about 33 per cent was generated by gas, and roughly 16 per cent from coal-all of it imported. In 2010, the island’s legislature introduced a renewable energy target that essentially instructed PREPA to source 12 per cent of energy from renewables by 2015-a target that it failed to meet.
