Trump killed Puerto Rico's solar lifeline to fund the utility that failed it

When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico in 2022, the centralized grid failed — again. The entire island lost power. But something different happened this time: privately installed rooftop solar systems performed exactly as designed. Solar companies reported that the vast majority of their customers with solar systems maintained power access after the storm. Fishermen kept their catch refrigerated. Hospitals stayed lit. Residents on medical equipment stayed alive. Congress saw that evidence and funded a program to put more of those proven systems on the rooftops of the island's most vulnerable residents. Then Trump killed it — and redirected the money to the very utility that failed them.

The Trump administration reportedly terminated the Energy Resilience Fund, a billion-dollar solar program putting panels and batteries on the homes of low-income and medically vulnerable Puerto Ricans, Grist reports. Only a fraction of the planned systems were installed before the program was cut in January, and a substantial portion of the remaining money was redirected to PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority — the utility whose repeated failures made the program necessary in the first place.

The people left without panels aren't abstractions. They're the elderly woman on a ventilator whose family spent months qualifying for a backup battery system that will now never arrive. They're the small-business owner in Humacao who watched neighbors with solar keep their freezers running through Fiona while everything in his shop spoiled. They're the dialysis patient who already survived a months-long blackout after Maria and was finally supposed to get a system that would keep her alive through the next storm. When the program was canceled, according to reports from Grist, low-income homeowners who had cleared every hurdle to qualify were simply left waiting.

The conventional defense of centralized grid investment is that it benefits everyone, not just individual homeowners with solar panels. But in Puerto Rico, the track record of the centralized approach is catastrophic. Congress allocated substantial federal funding to modernize the island's grid after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Over a decade later, PREPA has completed relatively few projects, spending a small fraction of those funds. The utility has been in bankruptcy proceedings for years. Puerto Rico still has among the highest rates of outages in the country, and electricity costs remain significantly higher than the national average. Reports indicate the Department of Energy arranged for the redirected grant to PREPA without a competitive bidding process.

Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans had already been voting with their wallets. By early 2022, tens of thousands of rooftop solar systems were already enrolled in the island's net-metering program, a boom driven largely by residents who had lost faith in the grid. The Energy Resilience Fund was designed to extend that proven resilience to people who couldn't afford to buy in on their own. Former Energy Department officials have questioned the logic of canceling a program that was working as intended to redirect funds to an entity with a troubled track record.

The pattern here is worth sitting with. A distributed, resident-owned energy solution with documented storm resilience — systems that kept people alive when the grid went dark — was defunded to prop up a centralized utility that has struggled to spend the vast majority of the billions already given to it. The residents left without panels are people who depend on powered medical equipment, who can't afford electricity bills significantly higher than what most Americans pay, and who have already survived blackouts lasting months. When we've covered climate wins, distributed solar in Puerto Rico was among the brightest. This reversal dims that considerably.