"The island is struggling to build a more stable electrical grid. What’s taking so long?"
"One night in November 2023, a few minutes before 9 p.m., three neighborhoods went dark in San Juan, Puerto Rico. No television for watching the game or internet for keeping up with friends. No air conditioning to take the stick off a humid night. The routine sounds of city life ceased, and an eerie quiet settled in.
Blackouts like this are common in Puerto Rico. Power is typically restored in a few hours, but sometimes the outages can last for days. Darkened traffic lights force people to treat multilane intersections like four-way stops, and there is no power to pump water into homes. Fifteen minutes of pounding rain can shake the feeble electrical wires enough to cause a local outage. Backup generators are costly and unrealistic in working-class neighborhoods. For a reporter passing through last fall, the blackout inconvenience was temporary: a hot night when the refrigerator wouldn’t keep a yogurt cold until morning. But for Puerto Ricans, it’s a routine reality—one that those on the US mainland can hardly imagine.
Puerto Rico stands at the center of two intersecting crises. Climate change is warming ocean temperatures to the point where hurricanes regularly hammer the island and its aging infrastructure. In 2017, Hurricane Maria left 200,000 families powerless for more than six months. Meanwhile, an old and poorly maintained energy grid largely built on fossil fuels is gradually falling apart after years of derelict management by the island’s former grid operator, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA)."
Marlowe Starling reports for Sierra magazine with photos by Ricardo Arduengo August 15, 2024.
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