In 2022, Joe Biden claimed that he was putting one billion U.S. dollars into a plan to revamp Puerto Rico’s electrical grid to prevent failure. But two years down the line and it is clear that the plan is a miserable failure and has resulted in almost no solar installations.
Thus far, a review of the $1 billion program has installed just a few test solar panels, not the wide scale installation to help boost the Puerto Rican energy grid that Biden and Harris promised.
Per the Washington Free Beacon:
During her remarks, Harris touted the so-called Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund, a $1 billion fund managed by the Department of Energy and designed by Democrats in 2022 to quickly address Puerto Rico’s electrical grid vulnerabilities via the installation of tens of thousands of rooftop solar and battery storage systems across the island. That fund has taken a central role in the administration’s plans to, as President Biden said in October 2022, “transform the entire” Puerto Rican grid.
While the Department of Energy declined to tell the Free Beacon how many solar panels have been installed using program funds, Sunnova Energy—one of two U.S. solar firms awarded funding to oversee implementation of the program—acknowledged that just “a small, initial batch” of installations have been completed across the entire island so far. The other firm, Generac Holdings, declined to comment.
Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D., Ariz.), one of the program’s architects, recently stated that the initial batch of solar installations was completed in mid-July, months after the Department of Energy originally promised. Grijalva helped insert the program in the 2023 government funding bill, which Biden signed into law in December 2022 after the president called for more green energy funding in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Fiona.
“The island is in the thick of hurricane season and high temperatures, and families on the island continue to battle weekly, or in some cases daily, power disruptions,” a solar industry expert with knowledge of the program’s inner workings told the Free Beacon. “We need to figure out how to move faster.”
The slow rollout of the Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund highlights the challenges facing the Biden-Harris administration as it attempts to oversee an influx of billions of dollars in green energy funding nationwide. And it further highlights the ongoing energy-related issues facing Puerto Ricans—in addition to the federal government’s ongoing inability to fully address those issues.
In other words, Biden has failed to fix the problem of a shaky energy grid.
He promised to stabilize Puerto Rico’s energy grid. And he threw one billion of our tax dollars at it on top of it all.
This is the lesson. Government can’t fix anything. Government is always a failure.
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