Something you could almost set your watch by, no?

Death, taxes, Democrats navel gazing...and the Puerto Rican electrical grid being totally afu.

There are simply constants in this world that never, ever change, and Puerto Rico in the dark is one of them.

...In Puerto Rico, where the so-called “national electric grid” has been darn near non-functional since time immemorial, the fight is taking on tragi-comic proportions.

Nearly six years after Hurricane María destroyed Puerto Rico’s electrical grid and triggered the second-longest blackout in world history, Raquel Maria Gonzalez Sparks still loses power weekly, if not daily.

The nonstop outages — which many on the island say worsened after a private company took over the public power system in June 2021 — have left Gonzalez’s life in tatters.

…The transformer down the block explodes at least once every two weeks, knocking out power for her entire neighborhood in a suburb of the sprawling capital city of San Juan. She needlessly burns through fuel as her car sits in traffic jams behind disabled stoplights. Her lungs ache from the air pollution spewed by her neighbors’ diesel generators that switch on during the extended blackouts that occur at least once per week. The roar of those generators all night keeps her from sleeping. The roasting heat on days when air conditioners don’t work raises her risk of heat stroke — as well as the risk for her 86-year-old mother.

That's from a post I wrote in August of 2023 referencing corruption directly related to 2017's Hurricane Maria and a yet-to-be-repaired electrical grid.

...A small taste of that was reported by The Intercept in 2018, when they broke word of a raid by the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, and federal officers. It was on a warehouse in Palo Seco, where they’d gotten word that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) was hoarding a massive amount of Hurricane Maria rebuilding materials, meant to be used IMMEDIATELY in the ongoing efforts to repair the devastated electrical grid.

ON SATURDAY, A day after becoming aware of a massive store of rebuilding materials being held by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the U.S. federal government — the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with their security detail — entered a Palo Seco warehouse owned by the public utility to claim and distribute the equipment, according to a spokesperson for the Corps.

…The federal government “began distributing [supplies] to contractors,” Vera said, including hard-to-find full-tension steel sleeves, critical to rebuilding. “We obtained several hundred of these sleeves on Saturday,” Vera added.

As of my report last year, a private US-Canadian venture, LUMA, which had taken over the project two years prior was raising rates to astronomical levels to cover decaying infrastructure repairs and the debt the previous government utility - Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) - had taken on as it then basically stole and hoarded supplies meant to deliver power to Puerto Ricans.

As if that weren't enough, activist groups like the Sierra Club were swooping in with lawsuits over the location of the renewables they were demanding LUMA incorporate.

...And NOW, only FOUR MONTHS LATER environmental groups are suing because the government wants renewables, but in places the environmentalists don’t approve of.

None of any of this got wires strung or the lights on reliably.

Here we are a year later on New Year's Eve and?

Puerto Rico celebrating the New Years like … pic.twitter.com/YO8JtqprAP

— 🌸 DigiGal (@DigitalGal_) December 31, 2024

IT'S ALL DARK

Major blackout in Puerto Rico on New Year’s Eve leaves the island (over 1.4 million clients) without power. ⚡️🪫

The electric grid is trash. No hurricane, no storm, just shady bureaucrats that are doing nothing but filling their pockets while people suffer.

Trump was right. pic.twitter.com/ptYb7mBBnb

— Melvin Soto-Vázquez (@realMelvinSoto) December 31, 2024

Puerto Rico is still relying on FEMA generators from 2017 for much of that back-up power generation, and no, I didn't mistype that.

...While blackouts are rare in Puerto Rico, the island struggles with chronic power outages blamed on a crumbling power grid that was razed by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm in September 2017.

The system, however, was already in decline after years of lack of maintenance and investment.

Only recently did crews start making permanent repairs to Puerto Rico’s power grid following Hurricane Maria. The island continues to depend on generators provided by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency to help stabilize the grid.

You'll notice the AP makes no mention of corruption as a main reason that crews have "only recently" begun to work on a grid destroyed by a storm seven years ago for which money has been flowing to the island ever since.

The AP does make a subtle slap at fossil fuels and a play for more solar without connecting that Cat 5 hurricanes take off the rooftops they - and the Sierra Club types - want the solar attached to.

...Power plants that rely on petroleum generate more than 60% of Puerto Rico’s energy, followed by natural gas and coal. Solar rooftops account for only about 7% of electricity consumption on an island with a poverty rate over 40%.

Besides the endemic corruption, fossil fuels are part of the problem. The other part of the problem is Puerto Rico itself - an island. You can't truck or train them in - they have to come by boat. Another reason hurricane relief is so ghastly slow is when they get smacked. If you can't get runways cleared for relief flights or have to fuel to get people out...hello?

ISLAND

Puerto Rico is also at the mercy of something known as The Jones Act (basically, any cargo being carried between two US ports must be on US-flagged vessels operated by US crews) because of specific language regarding visits to Puerto Rico by cargo ships. This makes getting them the fuel they need to keep those plants running and less expensive to do so impossible

...Delving further into the implications of the Jones Act on Puerto Rico itself, the stipulations within the Jones Act mean that any foreign flagged ships that need to dock at a port in Puerto Rico need to first be flagged at a mainland U.S. port before going to Puerto Rico. No foreign-flagged ship can go directly to a Puerto Rican port to drop off or load goods (CATO Institute, 1). This results in prices for imported goods being higher than they would have already been if they were brought directly to this island. For example, the Jones Act raises the cost of shipping by $568.9 million and overall prices on the island by $1.1 billion (CATO Institute, 2). The Jones Act can be waived in emergencies where certain types of supplies are urgently required (such as liquefied natural gas imports following Hurricane Fiona’s landfall in 2022 [Reason Foundation, 2022]), but the law ultimately comes back into effect following said waiver. Despite efforts to increase self-sustainability regarding farming and food production, Puerto Rico still imports 85% of its food. Additionally, all fuel to the island has to be imported (Reason Foundation, 2022). In Puerto Rico, where 41.7% of the population lives in poverty as of 2023 (US Census Bureau, 2023), these high costs inhibit much of the population from purchasing necessities as is needed on a regular basis.

What's the big deal, right? Send a US-flagged, US-crewed LNG tanker on a detour to Puerto Rico as it heads somewhere else, right?

What could be easier?

Oh...raising the dead?

Guess what we don't have.

...The Jones Act, a law that is over 100 years old, requires all ships used to move goods from one US port to another be US-owned, -built, -crewed, and -registered. This makes it impractical to ship goods from one US port to another because the amount of ships that meet these requirements is incredibly limited. Just 93 vessels worldwide were Jones Act compliant in January 2023, according to Statista. These problems are compounded for Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico because of their geography (e.g. distance, accessibility).

The law causes particular problems for the transportation of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). There is currently not a single LNG tanker that meets Jones act requirements. There are some smaller vessels in compliance, including barges, but nothing that can move LNG at scale. This means that US terminals can export LNG to other countries, or receive imports from other countries, but cannot receive LNG from other parts of the United States.

The Jones Act hampers the transportation of LNG domestically and makes it difficult for necessary energy to reach Americans. Different parts of the country even look to foreign sources of LNG instead of domestic sources because of the Jones Act. It is actually cheaper for New England to import its LNG from overseas than it is to purchase it domestically, in large part due to Jones Act restrictions. The US is the world’s largest natural gas producer yet Americans can’t realize many benefits arising from this incredible production.

All our domestic LNG goes by gas pipeline or railcar. Sucks to be an American island who needs it.

There's an argument to be made that Trump would be doing a huge service if he exempted Puerto Rico from the restrictions of that act.

In 2019, 47.53 million metric tons of liquified natural gas (LNG) valued at $12.4 billion dollars were exported from America to points all across the globe. Despite importing over $557 million of LNG in 2019 from as far afield as Oman, why did Puerto Rico only import 0.02 percent of their LNG from the United States of America?

Pause for a moment to ponder the language of colonialism that saturates the politics of Puerto Rico. There is a famous mural along the main freeway in San Juan that declares, “WE SEE OUR FUTURE AND ITS FREE OF COLONIZERS.” If we are to suppose then that this is an extractive colonial relationship with America as the oppressive colonizer and Puerto Rico as the oppressed colony (55 percent of the residents of Puerto Rico are on some form of federal economic assistance), then is not the colony supposed to help the empire? Why is Puerto Rico not being flooded with American LNG?

The truth is that both mainlanders and Puerto Ricans have been getting a raw deal for decades due to crippling federal and island legislation, underinvestment, and neglect. Past performance is not and does not have to be indicative of future performance.

Making America Great Again should also include Puerto Rico, where over 3 million U.S. citizens live. Strategically located at the northern edge of the Eastern Caribbean, Puerto Rico serves as a vital logistics hub linking the Eastern Seaboard, South America, and the Panama Canal. By its geopolitical birthright the island should be the booming advanced economic powerhouse of the Caribbean and America’s Latin American counterweight to the failed and corrupt regimes of Central America and what was once the Spanish Main. One only has to look to jurisdictions like Singapore or Hong Kong to imagine what should have been here—and can still be.  Puerto Rico should be a free zone, a place of investment, growth, innovation, and economic pride for mainlanders and Puerto Ricans alike.

President-elect Donald Trump’s MAGA movement emphasizes revitalizing industries, ensuring fiscal responsibility, and reinforcing global leadership. Trump projecting a new vision for Puerto Rico as America’s Singapore and recognizing Puerto Ricans as fellow Americans would energize the island. The way for Trump to guarantee a new and 100 percent favorable impression to all Puerto Ricans is simple: end the most hated piece of legislation on the island, the legislation that forces Puerto Rico to buy all its $447 million worth of consumed liquified natural gas from countries not named the USA—the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, commonly known as the Jones Act.

It's fascinating.

None of it changes Puerto Rican culture, of course. They have to do that themselves. A new governor is coming on January 2, so hope springs eternal, I suppose. 

When Jenniffer Gonzalez takes over as Puerto Rico governor she will have to navigate one of the biggest energy messes in the US. Her solution is to embrace fossil fuels https://t.co/z8vRUHnJez

— Bloomberg (@business) December 31, 2024

At least she's making sense when she sets out where she's going to start first which means Bloomberg has a waah.

...Only 7% of Puerto Rico’s power comes from renewable sources despite 2019 legislation that set ambitious targets for clean energy adoption, including 40% use by 2025. At the time, lawmakers expected to use federal resources to rebuild the island’s grid to prioritize renewables, in particular solar.

Gonzalez says the targets are getting in the way of other, cheaper, forms of energy and have slowed the use of some $17 billion in federal aid.

“I’m willing to revise whatever legislation is available to secure power that dramatically reduces the outages we are suffering,” she said.

Gonzalez’s proposals underscore a broader pushback against clean energy.

...While pushing for more natural gas, Gonzalez said she favors allowing individual solar customers to sell power back to the grid. The policy, called net-metering, has led to a boom in rooftop solar installations in Puerto Rico but it’s being challenged in court by the federal oversight board who runs the island’s finances.

“I am very much in favor of net-metering,” she said. “If you take away the only incentive people have, then nobody’s going to invest in solar energy.”

I also like that she doesn't suggest Puerto Rico subsidizes solar installations.

As power company LUMA is saying, anywhere from 24-48 hours before almost 2M customers have juice back on. 

I hope they at least have lights for her to take the oath, maybe with one of those FEMA generators that's still cranking away.

Let the girl get to work.