The coastal communities of Guayama and Salinas in southern Puerto Rico have acres of vibrant green farmland, and a rich, biodiverse estuary, the protect Jobos Bay, which stretches between the neighboring townships. But this future tropical paradise is also home to both a 52 year old oil-fired power plant and a 22-year-old coal-fired power plant, which local residents say pollutes their drinking water and air, and harms people’s health.
“It’s a classic sacrifice zone,” said Ruth Santiago, a lawyer and community activist who has fought environmental injustice in Puerto Rico for more than 20 years. “A friend calls it ‘the beautiful place with serious problems’.”
Local residents envision a cleaner future as these fossil fuel plants retire within the next few years. They see rooftop solar as the best alternative as the island transitions to renewable energy.
In November 2023, the federal government awarded $440 million in funding for rooftop solar in Puerto Rico, part of a billion dollars energy investment in the island. Officials have acknowledged in recent years that the region has suffered as home to polluting power plants.
After a visit to Salinas and Guayama in 2022, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan announced a plan to spend $100,000 to monitor air and water pollution from the coal-fired power plant, owned by the Virginia-based Applied Energy Services Corporation, to improve, or AES.
“For too long, communities in Puerto Rico have suffered unprecedented inequities — from challenges with access to clean drinking water to fragile infrastructure that cannot withstand the increase and intensity of storms caused by climate change,” Regan said. Press release.
In May 2023, the EPA examined a drinking water sample from groundwater near the power plants that supply drinking water to the region and found that metal levels not exceed federal criteria. EPA Public Information Officer Carlos Vega said more samples will be analyzed and the EPA will continue to inform the community. No timeline for the additional testing has been set.
For decades, most of Puerto Rico’s electricity was generated in the southern part of the island. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority uses over 30,000 miles of distribution lines to send energy generated in the south to more urban areas, mainly in the north, such as San Juan.
Coastal power plants in the south posed health risks to community members, Santiago said; according to a 2022 report from environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, the AES plant produces 800 tons coal ash waste per day polluting the air and nearby waters. Many low-income residents in the south struggle to pay electricity bills that exceed 30 percent higher than in the US as a whole. Almost half of Guayama’s residents were below the poverty line in 2022.
AES did not respond to multiple email requests for comment. AES Puerto Rico said their plants are in compliance with regulations in 2020 Press release.
Esther Frances/Medill News Service
an EPA inspection revealed in 2021 that the coal facility was not in compliance with the Clean Water Act for releasing polluted stormwater without a permit. In 2022, the EPA found the coal plant exceeded legal emission limits for pollutants such as carbon monoxide and mercury, according to a Earth justice analysis. The EPA has issued several other violations for the coal plant dating back to 2019, citing inadequate disposal of coal ash and endangering residents, according to the Environmental Integrity Projectan environmental watchdog group.
“People know that it’s a terrible impact, but it’s not easy to move to live somewhere else,” Santiago said.
Many local residents are unable to move because of average housing prices increased across the island since Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, according to activists and researchers in Puerto Rico.
The coal plant is scheduled to retire 2027, when a 25-year contract between AES and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority expires. To replace coal, AES turned to utility-scale solar power.
AES Puerto Rico has begun construction for the 135-acre site Ilumina Solar PV Park in Guayama in 2011. AES Puerto Rico’s coal plant, solar farm and a few smaller projects together provide up to 25 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity.
A few solar farms have already been built on the South Coast, and in February 2022, the Puerto Rican Energy Bureau approved 18 new utility-scale solar panels. projects across the island. Critics say the solar farms are using up dwindling farmland, and a group of environmental and public health organizations, including Earthjustice and the Sierra Club Puerto Rico filed a lawsuit in August 2023 to stop the government of Puerto Rico from allowing the solar farms to be built on ecologically important land.
A 2019 law mandated that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority reduce the use of fossil fuels for electrical generation on the island and generate 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. In addition, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority has a Integrated resource plan in 2020 which includes a plan to retire the Aguirre Power Complex oil-fired plant by 2030.
Instead of large solar farms, many local organizations in Puerto Rico see a better solution for their region’s electricity production—rooftop solar panels. They favor this type of solar energy for communities because, unlike large solar facilities, rooftop solar installations do not use farmland, which in Puerto Rico decreased by 37.5 percent between 2012 and 2018, according to the Census of Agriculture.
In February, the Department of Energy released the results of its study of Puerto Rican renewable energy, called PR100. The study reported the huge potential for rooftop solar in Puerto Rico—up to 6,100 MW by 2050 under the most aggressive scenario—but said utility-scale renewable energy will still be needed.
The study also noted the challenges in deploying rooftop solar, including unstable roofs and a lack of property titles. But Puerto Rico has a long way to go to reach the 2050 green energy goal; only from 2022 6 percent of electricity generated in Puerto Rico was renewable.
Ruth Santiago’s son Jose and other electricians helped install rooftop solar panels in Salinas neighborhoods through Coquí Solar, a community-based organization that works to help low-income and vulnerable residents get solar power.
The solar kits from Coquí Solar provided homes with solar panels and batteries, which could provide electricity during a blackout. Rooftop solar panels often cannot meet a home’s total electricity demand, but the battery storage the solar array generates can run important things like refrigerators, lights and medical equipment in the event of a power outage, while also providing a significantly reduce household energy bills.
The kits cost about $7,000, which Ruth Santiago said Coquí Solar purchased with grants from several Puerto Rico-based organizations and foundations. Coquí Solar, working with other organizations in the area, also installed the equipment for free in the homes of vulnerable community members. Jose Santiago said the elderly and people living with chronic diseases and disabilities in the area are suffering during eclipsewhich is frequent on the island.
“Every year the power goes out for five, six days,” Jose Santiago said. “Sometimes more, sometimes several times, and you don’t want to see the old people in line at the gas station trying to get ice to put in their fridge. Therefore, [rooftop solar energy] help them.”
After Hurricane Maria caused structural damage to the island’s electrical infrastructure in 2017, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority reported that all their electric consumers, more than 1.5 million customers, were without power. Some residents of Puerto Rico have close to 11 months without power, according to climate change and development specialist Ramón Bueno.
“It just sounds like a number, but all we have to think about is how do we deal with power loss for two, three days? It’s radical,” Bueno said. “So, two, three months is very radical. And five times it is even more.”
Ruth Santiago said that Coquí Solar’s rooftop solar installments empowered the community by giving residents “agency” over their electricity generation. The desire for electricity independence has grown in Puerto Rico following recent devastating hurricanes and other impacts of climate change.
Organizations like Coquí Solar have worked for years to decentralize solar power across the island, and Bueno said many are strong and independent.
“They are pretty articulate designers of an alternative way to move forward with energy systems,” Bueno said.
Ruth Santiago worried that the retirement dates of the coal and oil plants could be delayed or that a new infrastructure would be heavily dependent on solar power that would rely on a centralized grid and expose communities to blackouts during and after storms. She hoped that concerns about community health and the environment would be enough to force the plants to close on schedule and that rooftop solar would be prioritized over large-scale solar.
“We really need to go beyond resilience, we need to go to energy security and sovereignty, and that’s what we’re trying to do, at least create and do these pilot projects, these community-based examples of what that transformation would look like,” Ruth Santiago said. If we don’t do it now, then when?”
