Puerto Ricans Take Power Into Their Own Hands

Opening a conversation with community leaders in La Parguera, a small town in southwestern Puerto Rico, Juan Rosario warns that 2017’s Hurricane Maria was “a sign of things to come. These events are going to become more frequent, and the impacts more permanent. And the next time, there may not be any federal funds. We will need to depend on ourselves.”

More than eight years after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the electrical system crisis is still one of the top political issues on the island. The power system had already suffered from many years of deferred maintenance and mismanagement—and the power company was literally in bankruptcy—prior to Hurricane Maria. Afterwards, the slow deployment of federal funds and the local government’s misguided electrical system privatization initiative further hampered the recovery. The memory of their community’s desperation during the weeks-long power outage in La Parguera after Maria spurred these leaders to meet with Rosario to learn about AMANESER’s model of mutual aid–based solar installation. 

Electricity for the most vulnerable

“AMANESER grew out of decades of environmental justice work with communities across Puerto Rico, fighting plans for landfills and waste incinerators. Those fights generated a network of community groups that were able to pass Puerto Rico’s first recycling legislation and began to work on climate change and sustainability. In 2000, we began a series of workshops to try to expand the environmental movement’s conversation to include the fundamental causes of our systemic ecological predicament. In March 2015, I received a call from a local leader in the mountain municipality of Jayuya telling me, ‘Juan, every day that passes tells me that the predictions you made a decade ago were right.’ So we went back to Jayuya and for two years we had a dialogue with people there. They found the information relevant, but it led to little action. In December 2016, we formally incorporated AMANESER to work with communities to prepare for the impacts of climate change, knowing that it was only a matter of time before a major hurricane struck Puerto Rico… the timing was almost prophetic, because just nine months later we had not one, but three, major hurricanes passing Puerto Rico; the last one, Maria, devastated the island.”

AMANESER’s solar project got its start after Hurricane Maria in the small, remote mountain community of Veguita Zama in that same municipality of Jayuya where Juan had started conversations almost two years before. “It was a lesson in patience. Good work is never in vain, it only takes time.”

Veguita Zama ultimately went 11 months without power from the grid after Hurricane Maria. “After we had been working for a while with this community on the solar project, one of the leaders—a woman of indigenous descent—confessed to me that when we first came to the community, she thought we were crazy. She said, ‘we thought that solar was for rich people, not for us.’ But now she and her neighbors can point to systems on their roofs that they installed together.”

More than 4,000 people died in the first year after Maria. “These people were not killed by the hurricane. Inequality was the real killer. If you look at the deaths after Maria, it’s clear that the poorer sectors of the population were disproportionately impacted. In the months after the hurricane, the mortality rate kept going up amongst the lower-income population, even while it was declining for the middle and upper-income residents. I remember the despair of the communities that I visited around Christmas in 2017, three months after Maria…People were asking me if the power would ever come back, if the country would ever return to normal or if things were going to stay this way forever.” The incredibly slow power restoration times, especially in remote and mountainous regions, were the product of the prior dilapidated state of the power system (resulting in an unprecedented level of destruction) and incompetent responses at the federal and local level. The people of Veguita Zama who worked with AMANESER began having electricity for their critical needs just one month after the hurricane, while others had to wait up to a year. 

Building local knowledge

Today AMANESER has small community groups established or in formation in 10 municipalities around the island. Together these groups have installed about 90 systems. “Each group has someone with basic technical knowledge to be able to lead the collaborative work of maintenance and repairs, and we are designing workshops to deepen the knowledge of more members.”

The process of forming a local AMANESER group starts with a series of workshops on climate change, energy, and solar systems. From there, the group learns how to do most of the work of installing two-kilowatt solar systems with batteries—enough to meet a household’s critical needs for refrigeration, lighting, fans, and medical equipment. The final connections are performed by a licensed electrician. Because the majority of the installation work is done by the local group in a mutual aid model, and because AMANESER is often able to receive discounts and/or donations of equipment, the cost of a system to the household is typically $3,000–3,500. “Compare that to the systems that the private market is trying to sell to these same people, which are around $30,000 for a whole-house system. Even systems just for emergency back-up have an installed cost of $6–7,000. Our systems cost half what people would pay on the street.” 

True to the mutual aid spirit of the organization, AMANESER local groups have sometimes created new ways to support their neighbors without undermining the model. In Veguita Zama, for example, group members donated different solar system components to a man who had worked on all of his neighbors’ installations but had no money for a system of his own. “He didn’t pay for his system in cash, but he paid for it with his labor.”

Building community through mutual aid solar

At a solar installation workshop in the western municipality of Añasco, where a new AMANESER group started forming last year, members were learning how to install a bank of batteries. They took turns learning how to measure battery performance, cut cables, attach terminals, and wire the batteries together in series. The immediate goal was for the group to know how to diagnose problems and be able to replace a damaged battery—and to not have to depend on outside help that may be slow to arrive during a prolonged emergency. One of the group members pointed out that the relative simplicity and standardization of AMANESER’s systems goes hand-in-hand with the idea that technology should not be more complicated than what the community can learn to manage itself.

 But the workshop did not start with wires and electrical tools. Before the installation work began, group members shared food and conversation about what they are really trying to achieve, the vision of AMANESER, and how to move towards addressing the root causes of our current poly-crisis. “AMANESER’s work goes beyond installing rooftop solar… This is not a project to put up panels, it is a project to build communities.”

This is particularly important in Puerto Rico’s colonial context, “where there is so much dependence—both material and ideological—on the United States… We need to be creating mechanisms of community empowerment at the same time as we are addressing the urgent energy security need.”

If the Puerto Rico government had been willing to adopt a model like AMANESER’s, it would have been possible to guarantee energy security to all of the households that went more than three months without power after Hurricane Maria. (The idea of the government adopting a model like AMANESER’s may seem far-fetched, but AMANESER actually draws some of its inspiration from a 1950s era government program, “Self-Help and Mutual Aid,” in which the Puerto Rican government provided plots of land, materials, and tools to families to construct their own housing.) “Instead, the way that the government distributed funds basically guaranteed that those same people will be without power after the next hurricane”. 

Government programs using federal funds (which have now been cut off) were paying $30,000 for installed systems—ten times AMANESER’s cost—because they insisted on following a private model of renewable energy development and installing oversized systems instead of focusing on critical needs. “We need to pressure the government to work, but while the government is still not functioning well, we cannot let people die. We are not waiting for the government to act.”

Ditching fossil fuels is not enough

“The government’s approach is based on the dominant narrative that climate change is a technological problem, that everything would be solved if we stop using fossil fuels to produce energy and use solar panels with batteries instead. That is a necessary condition but not sufficient to repair the mess we have created. As we work for the introduction of more renewable energy, we will have to work to reduce our consumption not only of energy, but also of materials. If we insist on doing everything we do now with solar, it would still be very destructive in terms of the mining and resource consumption needed to produce that energy.”

Indeed, part of AMANESER’s community building and political education involves pushing groups to think beyond the bounds of their own communities and to consider the impacts of their consumption choices on others. During the battery installation workshop in Añasco, Rosario reminded the group why they had previously decided to install lead-acid batteries and not lithium.

 “When I met indigenous leaders from the Lithium Triangle in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, they told me, ‘your solar systems are killing our communities.’ I replied: ‘not ours, because we do not use lithium batteries.’ Can we demand justice for our community and for Puerto Rico while exploiting someone else’s community in South America or anywhere else?”

With its discussions of resource consumption, AMANESER builds toward an analysis that centers the pursuit of endless economic growth on a finite planet. “Climate change is a symptom of the problem. And the problem is that our current system cannot function within the planet’s physical limits. We are surpassing the planet’s physical limits, using resources faster than they can be renewed and generating wastes faster than they can be absorbed. We could solve climate change and still not solve the problem of humanity’s subsistence on this planet because there are other limits that we are exceeding… Most of the resource consumption is done by a relatively small part of the world, the industrial countries. And inside these countries a small number of citizens consume the lion’s share of the resources.” 

If communities were able to meet their energy, water, food, and housing needs through their own efforts outside predatory capitalist markets, they would be less dependent on the current economic system to meet their essential needs. And they would therefore also be less susceptible to false solutions – like the Puerto Rican government’s current insistence that the way out of the island’s energy crisis is through more investment in natural gas. 

System change from within

This year AMANESER plans to deepen its organizing work in two communities, starting by organizing around energy security and then building from there to incubate other community resilience projects that are grounded in the same philosophy: ensuring that basic needs can be met via solutions that are affordable and simple enough for the community to install and maintain themselves. This will likely include projects on rainwater harvesting, agroecology, emergency communications and/or other community priorities. The goal is to create spaces for conversation and political education to get buy-in around a vision, “a vision for a different country … one that is truly sustainable, just, democratic and joyful….One could envision a society that is sustainable in terms of resource consumption, but completely insupportable and unsustainable socially. You can’t have true sustainability without justice, without democracy.” 

Rosario sees AMANESER’s work ultimately as an experiment in changing the system from within, by “creating alternative communities, creating experiments” that can serve as “a real model of what it looks like to live sustainability, in community, in this century that is increasingly defined by climate change. And when major moments of tension with the existing system arise—as they are already arising—then we hope that experiments like this can serve as models for the future.”

As climate change continues to intensify, organizers will need to get prepared for more disasters and for the possibility that—as parts of Puerto Rico experienced after Hurricane Maria—no one is going to be coming to our communities’ rescue.

In the absence of a clear vision organizing people into collective projects to strengthen communities to confront these challenges, fear and uncertainty will drive more and more people into individualist survival strategies and right-wing ideologies based on division and oppression.

The experiences of Puerto Rico in the long aftermath of Hurricane Maria serve not only as a warning of what climate catastrophe can look like, but also as examples of new organizing experiments in building truly sustainable and resilient communities.