Solar Power Offers Puerto Ricans a Lifeline but Remains an Elusive Goal

The island’s energy grid has struggled to recover after Hurricane María almost wiped it out in 2017. While solar-power systems can fill gaps, they aren’t cheap.

As Puerto Rico reeled from its worst power outage in months, one that left virtually all of the island’s 1.5 million customers without electricity for days, the town of Adjuntas was an oasis.

On a Thursday morning in early April, with school closed, children filled seats in an air-conditioned cinema at a community center, a pizzeria prepped its kitchen for the lunch rush, and the local barbershop welcomed customers looking for a quick trim.

The contrast shows why Adjuntas, a community of about 18,000 in central Puerto Rico’s densely forested mountains, has become a showcase for how solar power could address one of the island’s most vexing problems — an energy grid that has struggled to recover after Hurricane María practically wiped it out in 2017.

Thanks largely to the work of Casa Pueblo, a nonprofit that works for conservation, about 400 homes and businesses in Adjuntas have solar power, including more than a dozen shops that are connected to a small network powered by the sun. With backup batteries, the systems can operate even in a blackout, keeping businesses open and turning the organization’s headquarters into a refuge for people who use medical devices that need to be powered.

“When you have energy security, you’re taking the weight off the shoulders of the employees as well as the families that come to the business,” said Ángel Irizarry Feliciano, owner of Lucy’s Pizza, which kept operating during the power outage. “It was a relief we could continue providing a service to our people without interruptions or having to reduce our hours.”

But the situation in Adjuntas also highlights how far the rest of Puerto Rico has to go on renewable energy, despite all the seemingly obvious reasons for it: the island’s long and sunny days; its need to import all other fuel, which makes electricity generation costly; and, of course, its constantly failing power grid.