Advocates Demand Return of $350M Solar Fund for Puerto Rico's Poorest Families

By Edwin V. Christopher

On a small island off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico called Culebra, a 61-year-old woman named Yvette Rodríguez goes to bed each night knowing that if the power goes out — as it frequently does — her husband cannot easily call for help. Luis Soler, 67, is a veteran and a double amputee. He sleeps in an electric adjustable bed and depends on air conditioning to manage serious heart problems in a region where heat advisories arrive with seasonal regularity. Rodríguez herself uses a sleep apnea machine. For them, electricity is not a convenience. It is a medical necessity, and it has been intermittent for years. They were among the 12,000 low-income families in Puerto Rico who had been approved to receive rooftop solar panels and battery storage systems under a $350 million federal program — a lifeline that was abruptly cancelled when the Trump administration quietly redirected the funds. Now, nearly 200 organizations across Puerto Rico and the continental United States are demanding that the money be restored before the program's May 9 deadline, and before the Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1. "For them in particular, whether they get a solar system or not is something that is really life or death," said Charlotte Gossett Navarro, Puerto Rico chief director for the Hispanic Federation, which co-signed a letter sent Wednesday to Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González and U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The letter, backed by a coalition that includes healthcare advocates, disability rights organizations, environmental groups, and community nonprofits, is the most forceful public mobilization yet against a funding cut that has quietly reshaped the prospects of thousands of the island's most vulnerable households. Six of the seven organizations that had been contracted to carry out solar installations are now either formally contesting the cancellation or negotiating directly with the U.S. Department of Energy to determine whether any path forward exists. **A Promise Made, Then Pulled Back** The program was designed with a specific and urgent purpose: to bring reliable, clean energy to Puerto Rican families who could not afford to purchase or finance solar systems on their own, and whose daily lives depended on a power grid that has been in various states of crisis for nearly a decade. Hurricane Maria leveled Puerto Rico's electrical infrastructure in September 2017. What had already been a deteriorating system — underfunded and poorly maintained for years before the storm — was completely destroyed. Recovery has been slow, politically fraught, and repeatedly interrupted. More than eight years after Maria, outages remain chronic across much of the island, and the approximately 3.2 million people who live there face a power bill that, for the poorest residents, frequently equals or exceeds their income from a single monthly Social Security check. For María Pérez, 80, and her 88-year-old husband, the solar program represented one of the only real prospects they had for escaping that trap. Pérez has high blood pressure, heart disease, and cataracts requiring medicated eyedrops that must be refrigerated. Her monthly Social Security payment is $364. Her electricity bill is often the same. "I put them on ice, but it's not the same," she said of her eyedrops, which she now stores in a makeshift arrangement during outages. "They have us suffering with that money that they took away from us. It's not fair." More than 6,000 households had already received solar installations under the program before the cancellation took effect. The remaining 12,000 families — many of whom had completed eligibility screenings, welcomed inspectors into their homes, or begun repairing their roofs in anticipation of installation — are now suspended in uncertainty, waiting to learn whether the federal government will follow through on a commitment that, for many of them, had already begun to feel real. **Redirected, Not Returned** Governor González has acknowledged that her administration had limited leverage in the decision. In public statements, she indicated that the federal government unilaterally determined it would not transfer the funds as planned, and that her office had no choice but to accept the redirection. The $350 million is now expected to be channeled into the broader rehabilitation of Puerto Rico's power grid infrastructure — a critical investment, but one that distributes its benefits broadly rather than directing immediate, individual relief to the island's most medically vulnerable residents. The distinction matters. Grid improvements take years to materialize and offer no protection against the next storm season for families who depend right now on electricity to power ventilators, dialysis machines, adjustable beds, and medication refrigeration. Rooftop solar paired with battery storage, by contrast, provides a household-level energy independence that does not disappear when the broader grid fails — which, on Puerto Rico, it still does with unsettling regularity. Gabriela Joglar Burrowes, executive director of Puerto Rico's Statewide Independent Living Council and a signatory to the coalition letter, framed the stakes in terms that went beyond inconvenience. "If you're a person who depends on equipment like a ventilator, a dialysis machine or medicine that requires refrigeration, the lack of consistent energy represents a risk that could lead to even death," she said. Joglar Burrowes, who is herself disabled, rejected the suggestion that families in this situation could simply wait for longer-term grid improvements to benefit them. She described the cancellation as a form of abandonment — a signal, however unintentional, that the most vulnerable residents of an already marginalized U.S. territory were not a priority. "It seems like sometimes we're disposable, and we're not," she said. **A Growing Island of Solar — But Not for Everyone** The cancellation arrives against a backdrop of broader solar growth across Puerto Rico that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an average of 3,850 rooftop solar systems were installed per month across the island throughout 2025, bringing the total number of installed systems to roughly 192,000 by year's end. More than 171,000 homes and businesses have also added distributed battery storage. Puerto Rico now has one of the highest per-capita rates of residential solar adoption in the United States. But that growth has not reached the families who need it most. With a poverty rate above 40 percent — among the highest of any U.S. state or territory — a substantial portion of Puerto Rico's population has been left entirely outside the private solar market. The $350 million program existed precisely to close that gap, using federal recovery funds to reach households that the commercial solar industry has no financial incentive to serve. The communities most affected by the cancellation are concentrated in Puerto Rico's rural interior: mountainous towns like Adjuntas, Jayuya, and Orocovis, where the terrain that makes the landscape beautiful also makes it the hardest to reach in an emergency. "It's even more concerning," Gossett Navarro said of those rural families. "It's hard to get out of the mountains when there's a disaster." With the Atlantic hurricane season weeks away and a May 9 administrative deadline fast approaching, the window to reverse the cancellation is narrowing. The coalition letter asks Governor González and Secretary Wright to act immediately — to restore the funding, reactivate the installation pipeline, and honor what was promised to families who rearranged their lives in anticipation of receiving it. The U.S. Department of Energy has stated publicly that some portion of the affected families may still receive solar systems, but officials have not specified how many, under what criteria, or on what timeline. For Yvette Rodríguez on Culebra, for María Pérez with her eyedrops on ice, and for thousands of others whose names have not yet appeared in any public statement, that ambiguity is its own kind of answer — and it is not the one they were waiting for.