In September 2017, Hurricane Maria left María Pérez without electricity for nearly three months in Puerto Rico. Her house in Salinas, located on the island’s southern coast near a river, was inundated with a mix of muddy water and animal waste, reaching up to three feet and damaging her home’s hallways. Over those months, she had to clean and rebuild her home without power.
Five years later, as Hurricane Fiona approached, Pérez took precautions. She and her family secured their home by boarding up windows and doors, sealing openings with silicone, and moving to her daughter’s house, which also lost power during the storm.
Pérez, who has a heart condition that makes heat intolerable, depends on air conditioning, especially during hot and humid summers with temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The power outage due to Fiona again put her health in jeopardy.
These experiences made it clear to her that she needed a reliable source of electricity, independent of the island’s grid, which not only failed during storms but also had the highest outage rates in the country.
When she learned that the U.S. federal government planned to offer solar panels and battery storage to low-income Puerto Ricans and those with medical conditions over a year after Fiona, she eagerly embraced the opportunity. After spending years gathering homeownership documents, submitting financial records showing she and her husband survive on $900 monthly from Social Security, and undergoing multiple inspections by solar company representatives, she met all requirements.
However, in January, the Trump administration abruptly terminated the program’s funding. The future she had worked toward for over a year, involving solar panels and a battery system to secure her health, disappeared overnight.
“My turn was next,” Pérez told Grist. “It’s done in shifts, and I was next. Why did this happen?”
Pérez was among up to 40,000 low-income or medically at-risk Puerto Ricans set to receive solar panels and battery systems through the Energy Resilience Fund, a $1 billion initiative by Congress in 2022. President Donald Trump and his administration, with assistance from the Puerto Rican governor, gradually diminished the effort since returning to office, first pausing and then permanently stopping the payments over the year. Only 6,000 solar and battery systems were installed before funding ceased.
The Department of Energy has redirected more than a third of the solar funding initially intended for the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, a government-owned utility with a troubled history on the island. The utility has long been plagued by corruption and mismanagement, and has been in bankruptcy proceedings for about nine years, one of the longest utility bankruptcies in the U.S. Congress allocated over $17 billion to modernize Puerto Rico’s grid after Hurricane Maria, but over a decade later, PREPA has completed just 16 projects, spending less than $100 million of those funds. (PREPA representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)
The Energy Department earmarked its latest financial infusion for “key emergency activities designed to address critical vulnerabilities across generation, transmission, and distribution systems.” The grant was also “noncompetitive,” meaning no bids were solicited before reallocating the solar funding to the utility.
“Why would you cancel something that is working as intended and being executed, to give it to someone that has a bad history?” questioned one former Energy Department official, referring to PREPA. “Why are we risking these funds?”
Puerto Rico’s grid has long been fragile and unreliable, primarily relying on imported oil, gas, and coal to generate electricity. Although most population centers are in the north around San Juan, the power plants are mainly on the southern coast. Transmission and distribution lines traverse mountainous terrain to distribute electricity across the island.
When Hurricane Maria struck as a Category 4 storm, this network failed. High-speed winds twisted and flattened transmission towers, substations flooded, and power lines snapped or toppled, resulting in the longest blackout in U.S. history. Every Puerto Rican on the island lost power, and some residents in remote areas were without it for almost a year.
Most of the approximately 3,000 fatalities linked to Maria were due not to the hurricane itself but to the collapse of the grid and healthcare infrastructure. Diabetics could not refrigerate insulin, dialysis patients missed treatments, and those dependent on oxygen machines and ventilators lost access.
The estimated cost to repair the island’s power lines exceeded $100 billion. Congress intervened with funding, earmarking more than $15 billion to PREPA for grid rebuilding. This funding came at a crucial time for the utility. Just two months before Maria, burdened with $9 billion in bond debt and no clear repayment path, PREPA had filed for bankruptcy. With federal cash, the utility appeared to have the means to stabilize financially and rebuild a more robust grid post-Maria.
Four years later, that optimistic vision has yet to be realized. Outages remain frequent, electricity costs are double the national average, and communities experience long delays in restoring service after storms and floods. These issues persisted even after PREPA outsourced electricity generation to Genera, a subsidiary of natural gas firm New Fortress Energy, and tasked Luma Energy with power distribution island-wide. Privatizing these roles was proposed as a solution to the grid’s problems, but in practice, neither company significantly improved reliability or affordability for Puerto Ricans. As a result, a mix of nonprofits, private solar companies, and wealthy Puerto Ricans began installing rooftop solar and battery systems. Within a year of Hurricane Maria, over 10,000 new solar and battery systems were privately installed — nearly double the total installations in prior years combined. By early 2022, around 42,000 rooftop solar systems participated in the island’s net-metering program.
Hurricane Fiona put these solar systems to the test. Most who had installed panels kept their lights on after the storm. Sunnova Energy, a key solar installer on the island, reported that 97 percent of its 30,000 customers had power in the days following the storm. This included fishermen needing electricity for refrigeration, hospitals and fire stations with solar backup power, residents in remote regions, and those relying on power for medical equipment or to keep prescriptions cool.
The experiences with Fiona prompted lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to act again. Seeing clear evidence of the resilience of a distributed energy system, Congress set aside new funding for solar and battery systems for low-income Puerto Ricans and those reliant on electrical medical devices. Led by Representative Raúl Grijalva, Congress allocated $1 billion as part of an appropriations package “to carry out activities to improve the resilience of the Puerto Rican electric grid.” Jenniffer González-Colón, the governor of Puerto Rico, was then the resident commissioner for Puerto Rico, the island’s one non-voting member in the U.S. House of Representatives, and championed the effort alongside other congressional members.
The task of interpreting the appropriations package and distributing the funds fell to the Energy Department, led at the time by Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat appointed by then-President Joe Biden. Although Congress had indicated the money could aid low-income households in acquiring solar and battery systems, it did not mandate this as the sole use. To clarify, Energy Department officials began discussions with lawmakers who had championed the funding, making clear the money was meant for distributed solar systems, according to people involved in those conversations who requested anonymity to protect their current employment.
As the agency considered important questions about program implementation, Grijalva and other lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary Granholm in April 2023, emphasizing the critical role solar and battery systems played in maintaining power during Hurricane Fiona. “Residential solar and storage systems are critical lifelines when Puerto Rico’s power grid fails during natural disasters,” the letter said, urging the department to consider “solar power and storage for individual households” and to “prioritize low-income people with disabilities.”
Congress did not intend to duplicate ongoing federal efforts to repair and strengthen the island’s energy systems, already funded with $20 billion in aid post-Maria. Instead, it wanted the agency to use the new $1 billion to “ensure that the most vulnerable households have access to localized power and backup battery storage,” said an Energy Department official who attended meetings with Grijalva and other lawmakers, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ritchie Torres, and Nydia Velázquez.
The goal was to ensure that “if something else happens, another storm, another long-term outage happens while the long-term reconstruction is taking place, we don’t see what happened after Maria,” they added.
The Energy Department promptly began designing programs to distribute the funds, identify local partners, and issue awards. It established three main initiatives: Approximately $490 million was directed to Sunnova Energy and Generac to install solar and battery systems for low-income households, particularly those reliant on medical devices or living in areas prone to outages. Another $48 million was awarded to four nonprofits — Barrio Eléctrico, Environmental Defense Fund, Let’s Share the Sun Foundation, and Solar United Neighbors — to deploy up to 2,000 residential solar and storage systems for low-income Puerto Ricans with health issues. Another $365 million was awarded to solar companies and nonprofit groups to install solar and battery systems at community health care facilities and community centers. Establishing all three programs and beginning to disburse funds took most of 2023 and 2024.
However, just as funding began flowing, Trump secured a second presidential term, pledging to dismantle Biden’s climate programs. Within a year, all three Puerto Rican solar initiatives were gone.
Governor González-Colón’s stance had also changed by then. In a separate press release the same day announcing the reallocation of funds to PREPA, she stated that the Trump administration had prioritized Puerto Rico’s energy needs, emphasizing that the island could not depend on “piecemeal approaches with limited results.” (A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
The final blow came in January when the Department of Energy announced via email the cancellation of $350 million in grants for low-income household systems. “The electric system of Puerto Rico cannot afford to operate with more distributed solar,” the agency stated. Although the funds haven’t officially been redirected to PREPA, former DOE officials believe the money will likely end up there.
An Energy Department spokesperson provided a webpage link with frequently asked questions about the fund. Created six days after Grist’s initial inquiry, the page states the department’s goal is to provide reliable power “for the greatest number of Puerto Ricans and provide a quicker end to the energy emergency.” By repairing existing fossil fuel power plants and modernizing the grid, “all 3.2 million residents, including low-income and medically vulnerable households, experience more reliable power,” it notes.
The page also explains that the decision to cancel the solar programs was not made lightly, highlighting that continuing rooftop solar funding would “exacerbate reliability issues with the distribution grid and only cover a very small segment of the population.” However, there is little evidence that the increase in rooftop solar installations has worsened grid reliability.
When Wanda Ríos first heard about the $1 billion program, she recognized its potential benefits for her neighbors in Salinas, especially the La Margarita community, where most residents are elderly and face significant health challenges. Over 80 percent of the homes in La Margarita, like María Pérez’s, are in a FEMA-designated floodplain. Power outages occur whenever water levels rise. At that time, only five of the approximately 300 homes in the neighborhood had battery and solar systems.
“Because we have the river, everything gets shut down,” she said. “And that’s why it was important that everybody produce their own energy in their own house.”
Ríos, a community organizer and leader of AbeynoCoop, an energy cooperative aiming to improve solar and battery system access in Salinas, began securing federal funds in 2023. She contacted David Ortiz, a senior program director for Puerto Rico at Solar United Neighbors, a solar advocacy group. Together with other partners, they applied for a $6 million grant from the Energy Department’s pool, enough to install about 150 solar systems in Salinas.
By winter 2023, they learned they were awarded the grant, but finalizing it required immense work. Ortiz, Rios, and their partners had to identify community members needing the systems and develop budgets estimating costs, which involved knocking on doors, convincing residents of the systems’ benefits, and collecting the necessary financial and medical documents for eligibility. Getting everyone on board took over a year.
However, last year the program came to a halt. Ortiz awaited final approval or sign-off on a new budget and updated program costs, but the agency did not schedule a meeting — let alone start installing panels.
“In our case, and in another grantee’s case, we both hadn’t started installing because we had been waiting for a very long time to try to get the meeting for definitization to happen,” Ortiz explained, referring to one of the final steps in project approval.
Then, unexpectedly, a letter arrived in January informing Solar United Neighbors that their grant was terminated. The news was devastating. Ríos had to announce the termination on Facebook. “People were pretty sad,” she said. “We were wasting their time for two years.”
Ríos had passed on other opportunities to pursue grants, she said, because federal rules barred her from applying to different funding sources for the same project. The residents who signed up with Solar United Neighbors also didn’t know they should seek other options to secure their energy systems.
“They probably have another opportunity to get a system, but they didn’t because they trust me, they trust Abeyno Coop,” Ríos said.
Solar United Neighbors is represented by Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit advocating for organizations that lost federal funding over the past year under the Trump administration, and Earthjustice, an environmental group. Pérez is not giving up. She’s determined to fund the system herself with help from nonprofit grants and other private entities. She has been contacting solar companies for cost estimates and working with Ríos’ cooperative to find alternatives.
“I’ll find a way, because I’ve always been a salesperson,” she said.
Benton Graham contributed reporting to this story.
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