Puerto Rico’s new governor, Trump ally Jenniffer González-Colón, ran and won on a platform to modernize and stabilize the island’s fragile power grid.
When she entered the race in 2024 against an incumbent governor from her own pro-statehood party, González-Colón pledged to oust Luma Energy, the private company that manages the island’s transmission and distribution. She also promised to diversify Puerto Rico’s energy mix, and lower some of the region’s clean energy targets in favor of natural gas.
When she was sworn in as governor on January 2, thousands of people were still without power following a massive island-wide blackout that crippled the grid on New Year’s Eve: a juxtaposition that underscored the urgency of the problems she was elected to solve.
As a Republican, González-Colón served as Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in the House of Representatives for nearly a decade. She was a staunch supporter of solar energy, leading efforts to protect net metering on the island. She also vocally backed the 2022 creation of the billion-dollar Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund, which funds backup power for the island’s most vulnerable people.
And as recently as February, when she met with Energy Secretary Chris Wright during a visit to Washington, González-Colón advocated for the continuation of the programs paid for by that fund, sources told Latitude Media. “We had a very productive and positive meeting with Secretary Chris Wright,” González-Colón wrote on X following the meeting. “It’s so refreshing to see someone at the helm of the Department of Energy with [a] sense of urgency and ready to take action to keep the power on in Puerto Rico.”
The Department of Energy initially appeared to respect the governor’s wishes. Grantees who had been formally selected to build backup power for hospitals and multi-family housing facilities via the $365-million Programa de Comunidades Resilientes received an email from the agency in early March, notifying them that the process of finalizing the terms and conditions of the award would be moving forward.
As one person directly involved with the program, who wished to remain anonymous, put it to Latitude: “At that point we thought the program was going to be safe, at least probably the hospital part — who could argue against backup power for hospitals, right?”
But the meetings to finalize the awards were never scheduled. And within a matter of weeks, things fell apart.
As the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency ramped up their overhaul of the federal government, the career staff at DOE who worked on the agency’s Puerto Rico portfolio were shunted aside, replaced by an informal “Puerto Rico taskforce” — led by a Trump appointee who from day one was determined to stop the resiliency project in its tracks.
Then, in a move that many stakeholders considered the death blow to the program, its key champion abruptly reversed course. According to reporting by El Nuevo Día, as of last week González-Colón has “accepted without resistance” plans to cancel the $365 million fund’s use for backup power provided largely by solar and storage. Instead, her administration is pushing to redirect the money to transmission and distribution projects seen as more palatable to the Trump administration.
The new face of DOE
Funding for the Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund doesn’t stem from either of the Biden era’s now-controversial laws, the Inflation Reduction Act or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Rather, Congress appropriated $1 billion for boosting resiliency in Puerto Rico’s power grid for fiscal year 2023, and tasked DOE’s Grid Deployment Office with managing and distributing the funds. That office then designed two key pathways for administering the money.
The first, Programa Acceso Solar, aims to install rooftop solar and battery storage systems for 30,000 low-income households in Puerto Rico. That program has faced extensive delays, and its future is uncertain, but at least it managed to get its work started; a portion of the funds have been distributed, and award recipients have deployed several thousand systems.
That’s not the case for the Programa de Comunidades Resilientes, dedicated to backup power for hospitals and community housing facilities, including for elderly and disabled residents. Though at the end of 2024 GDO had vetted and selected projects — and issued formal notifications of conditional awards — the awards still haven’t been finalized, so no funds have been disbursed.
Neither program, however, went unscathed by the broad upheaval this spring at the Department of Energy. By the time the March 4 email went out to awardees, some of the subject matter experts who had joined DOE to design and manage the agency’s grid work in Puerto Rico had already left DOE; those who remained were largely cut out of conversations about the funding. (Today, only one of the office’s experts on the Puerto Rico portfolio is still there.)
Instead, the programs were handed over to the newly-formed Puerto Rico task force, which took over communications with González-Colón’s office without ever so much as introducing themselves to the existing team at GDO, much less receiving a briefing on the office’s work on the island.
DOE’s Puerto Rico portfolio is currently being led by Katie Jereza, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Electricity. During the first Trump administration, Jereza notably worked to suppress the results of an interconnection study conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, after deeming the findings “anti-coal.”
Dashed hopes
In mid-March, Jereza and the task force traveled to San Juan for a series of meetings with energy stakeholders including the governor’s office, Luma Energy, and the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau. With Jereza was the senior GDO advisor Tina Francone, a Trump appointee who previously served as COO at Save our Grid, an advocacy group that argues renewables expansion is making the grid less reliable and causing blackouts.
Attendees of those meetings described them as “chaotic”; it quickly became clear that the DOE representatives weren’t up to date on any of the agency’s work on the island. But according to sources familiar with the creation of the task force, Jereza never intended to allow the community resilience program to proceed.
One early indicator, they said, was that Jereza and her staff had asked DOE’s general counsel to investigate how they could argue that solar and storage couldn’t be defined as “resiliency” efforts, thereby making it easier to roll back the funds. (The legislation authorizing the funding explicitly requires that it “remain available until expended, to carry out activities to improve the resilience of the Puerto Rican electric grid.”)
But when Jereza visited the island in mid-March, project stakeholders on the ground were still hopeful that the program could be saved. During meetings with the task force, they highlighted the fact that the primary use of the $365 million would be to purchase batteries, largely manufactured by Tesla, hoping the connection to Trump ally Elon Musk would help protect the projects. They also suggested adding gas generators to the backup power designs for the hospitals and multi-family housing facilities, in an attempt to make the program more appealing, two sources familiar with the meetings told Latitude.
And it was the governor’s office, they added, who pointed out to Jereza and her team that after a hurricane roads in Puerto Rico are often closed, making generators less reliable than solar and storage.
We thought the program was going to be safe, at least probably the hospital part — who could argue against backup power for hospitals, right?
But the DOE cohort advised attendees “not to take it personally” if the program didn’t move forward. The agency, they said, was under a lot of pressure to evaluate all federal funding allocated under the Biden administration, and not move forward with anything just because funds had been committed.
In the weeks that followed that meeting, González-Colón’s public support for the community resilience funding she had once claimed credit for began to wane. By late April, she was telling the island’s media the program had been canceled, pointing to federal efforts to eliminate spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Multiple sources who spoke with Latitude speculated that in the face of DOE pressure, González-Colón opted to side with the Trump administration rather than risk losing the money altogether.
And as for Jereza, one source said they suspect she’s attempting to “curry favor” with Republicans for her upcoming confirmation vote in the Senate. “Trump doesn’t like solar, and doesn’t really like Puerto Rico, so taking money away from something to give to fossil fuel interests is something that she thinks Trump would like,” they said. “And she’s probably right.”
In response to Latitude’s request for comment on reports that the resiliency fund was being canceled and the money reallocated, a DOE spokesperson said the agency is “actively working with Governor González-Colón and the White House to strengthen Puerto Rico’s power grid and ensure the people of Puerto Rico have access to the reliable, affordable and secure energy.” González-Colón’s office did not respond.
Resilience for 2025
The ongoing delay in administering the backup power program has caught the attention of Congress, where sources tell Latitude that minority staff in both chambers are keeping a close eye on how things unfold.
In early April, House Democrats including Puerto Rico representative Pablo José Hernández and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, wrote to Secretary Wright expressing “deep concern regarding delays in the deployment of critical funds from the Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund.” In particular, the letter continued, the lawmakers “are concerned by recent reports that the Department has not yet finalized agreements to release $365 million under the program to enhance energy security in multi-family housing properties and community healthcare facilities.”
It’s possible the topic will come up at Jereza’s confirmation hearing, which is scheduled for tomorrow. One program proponent told Latitude that they’re “hoping there’s at least one Republican on that committee that cares about hospitals and [says] ‘Let me get this straight. You want to take money away from 25 years of energy security for dialysis centers and health clinics?’”
In December, DOE said they would finalize resiliency award offers by April 30, a deadline that has now come and gone. Recipients continue to call and email GDO, because as one recipient explained, the expiration date was really just a self-imposed deadline to ensure things kept moving forward.
But some stakeholders see González-Colón as the only one who could step in to ensure the $365 million set aside for hospital backup power via the Programa de Comunidades Resilientes is spent as planned. It’s not clear exactly how much leverage González-Colón really has with the Trump administration, one source said, but her “backchannel communication” with DOE means she has the “ability and the channel” to communicate directly with Secretary Wright’s office.
“So the fact that she has flip-flopped is really disheartening,” they added.
The cost of delay
Even if the governor changes her stance back and successfully executes a pressure campaign to finalize the conditional awards, this period of waiting has already had repercussions, said one stakeholder.
“There’s going to be no one there to administer the funding on the DOE headquarters side, and they’re going to have to build out a new team from scratch,” they said. “That’s going to take a very long time….Nothing is going to get built this year.”
In the meantime, Puerto Rico is rapidly approaching another hurricane season. Luma Energy has already warned that the island will face a significant generation shortfall and increased power outages in 2025.
In the runup to Easter weekend last month, the island suffered its second massive blackout of 2025, which left 1.4 million people without electricity, and thousands without water. Though all of the island’s hospitals transitioned over to backup generators and continued to offer emergency services, The San Juan Daily Star reported that at least two medical centers experienced partial failure of those backup systems.
The impact of such blackouts highlight the importance of immediate resiliency efforts like those created by the Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund, one source familiar with the specifics of the program explained.
“This is not a solar program; it’s about backup power,” they said, adding that decentralized generation is the fastest way to create reliability for critical facilities, and should be deployed while broader work happens to repair the grid. “If you cancel the entire program and you give the funds to the grid operator…these issues will eventually go away, but certainly not in the near term, which is what these hospitals really need.”
In fact, another source pointed out that the resiliency programs were originally designed to circumvent the “tight bottleneck” that most federal funding for the island’s grid infrastructure faces. “This is supposed to be supplementary,” they added. “Redirecting it towards that bottleneck is just antithetical to what this whole thing was about.”
