Canary Media: Sky-high oil prices are about to hit Puerto Rico’s grid.
“In the continental U.S., no one’s burning a significant quantity of oil to generate electricity,” said Cathy Kunkel, an energy consultant at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. But that’s not the case in Puerto Rico, where oil-fired plants make up about 60% of generating capacity. The island “just has a lot of old oil-fired power plants that were constructed in the ’60s and ’70s, when oil was obviously a lot cheaper.”
Island nations like Puerto Rico really highlight the costs of having to import fossil fuels, both in money and in dependence. The economic barriers are often high, but situations like these should be prime candidates to move to distributed renewable energy sources. Unfortunately, “Jenniffer González-Colón, the Trump-allied governor of Puerto Rico elected in 2024, has supported plans to boost the island’s gas generation and weakened a 2019 law that commits it to ditching fossil fuels by 2050.”