, the Department of Energy found that Puerto Rico could potentially meet all its residential consumption needs with rooftop solar alone. But refining those broad strokes to the level needed to start building involves answering some complex technical questions.
It’s a treacherous stretch for energy policies, not just in Puerto Rico. A lot of money is at stake, and complex bureaucratic processes provide ample opportunity for derailment and delay. Leah Stokes, in her booklikens it to “organized combat” between various factions battling it out in regulatory trench warfare. Many observers of the last five years of grid reconstruction worry the findings will simply be ignored.
This has proven challenging. For nearly a century, PREPA had sole dominion over Puerto Rico’s energy system. The state-owned, vertically integrated monopoly electrified the island with oil-burning power plants and mountain-spanning transmission lines, playing a major role in Puerto Rico’s industrialization.
After Maria, these groups squared off before the bureau during a process known as integrated resource planning, where utilities outline their future investments and commissions check whether they meet energy needs and policy goals for the lowest cost. PREPA’s initial proposal was to build new gas plants, but local activists with support from larger environmental groups successfully lobbied for a plan that mandated the utility purchase renewables and phase out fossil fuels.
Frustrated with PREPA’s delays, the bureau seized control of the process last year and hired a contractor to handle future renewable procurements. The process appears to be moving faster since then, but PREPA’s foot-dragging tilted the scale in favor of fossil fuels. In August, the bureau told PREPA to start studying the feasibility of one of the gas plants it had long been pushing, saying that PREPA’s own slowness adding renewables to the grid may have made it necessary.
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