A ‘Flood’ Of Solar Panels Threatens Puerto Rico’s Farmers — And Neighbors’ Lives

The conflict highlights the promise and peril of easing requirements on companies seeking federal approval for energy projects.

This story is the second installment of a three-part series on Puerto Rico’s energy transition. Read Part 1 here. Part 3 will publish on Monday.

SALINAS, Puerto Rico — Diana Santi was used to stocking the shelves of her corner grocer in this tiny town with canned and preserved foods from the continental United States.

She never understood why the fertile flatlands in this part of Puerto Rico’s southeast coast weren’t used to grow more local crops — she always had to pay a markup for shipping costs. But she’s had a more pressing problem: Keeping the perishables she sells from spoiling in the power outages that still plague the most populous U.S. territory seven years after Hurricane María laid waste to the Caribbean archipelago’s electrical grid.

When solar energy developers started staking out the open fields a few years ago, she thought things might improve. But as nearly 150,000 panels went up in neat rows on hundreds of acres around her town, Santi’s problems worsened. Her utility bills kept going up. Her power still went out almost daily.

Then came the deluge. Her barrio — known as El Coquí, named for the chirping frog that serves as Puerto Rico’s ubiquitous mascot — had avoided devastating flooding in previous storms. As Hurricane Fiona made landfall here in September 2022, however, brown floodwaters gushed into her Colmado Santiago market, destroying $3,000 of merchandise and depositing so much mud it took her family four days to clear the muck.