Rivers, Wires, and Ruins: Preliminary Notes on the Making of Puerto Rico’s Energy Landscape
A. Ortega Torres — Notebook, Circulating Draft
(These pages remain what they first were: fragments gathered while moving through different repositories, none of which were designed to speak to each other. What coherence exists here emerges from the act of walking between archives rather than from the documents themselves.)
I. First Pass Through the Material
What strikes me early is the absence of a single guiding thread. The system does not read like a project but like sediment. Picó wrote somewhere that many Puerto Rican institutions advance por añadidura, not by design, and that phrase returned more than once as I tried to reconcile electrical memos with territorial plans drafted as if the grid were an afterthought.
Roosevelt Roads’ files complicate this further: an entire energy world built parallel to the island, detached from civilian concerns, operating as if sovereignty were a technical specification.
Nothing in this first layer behaves like a unified record; it requires stitching, and perhaps a willingness to accept the stitches will always show.
II. Hydroelectric Beginnings
Carite, Toro Negro, Dos Bocas: a small constellation, but stubborn in its presence. What survives—marginal notes in graphite, logs where water levels are recorded almost like moods, repairs done between rainbursts—describes a technology governed by landscape rather than imposed upon it.
The Cooperative’s historical notes confirm the scale: modest, seasonal, and surprisingly stable.
I kept thinking of Quintero Rivera’s discussions of economies that negotiated their rhythms with the land rather than with external markets.
These plants feel closer to that logic than to the industrial optimism that would come later.
III. Mid-Century Turn
Somewhere in the 1940s–1950s, the archive shifts tone. The hydroelectric handwriting gives way to reports typed on imported paper. Thermoelectric plants appear not as experiments but as conclusions already decided elsewhere.
Scarano’s broader synthesis on industrialization helps outline the context, but the energy dimension reveals another layer: dependence took root early, long before the numbers we repeat today—over 80% fossil reliance—became statistics (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2023).
It is less a policy choice than a gravitational pull set in motion mid-century.
IV. The BONUS Interruption
The BONUS reactor is easy to miss in most narrative histories, but impossible to ignore in federal files. The Department of Energy’s fact sheet (2009) reads like a note from a finished experiment; local memos tell a different story: corrosion here, uncertainty there, budgets shifting mid-year.
Its closure feels abrupt, unresolved. What lingers is the sense—found elsewhere too, in Vieques—that the territory was treated as an available surface rather than a partner.
V. Military Terrains and Energy Worlds
Roosevelt Roads, with its redundancies and independent systems, reads as an enclave.
Vieques reads as another, though shaped by explosive detonations, displacement, and controlled land access. In both, the energy story hides within files not labeled “energy” at all—training schedules, land-use restrictions, requisition lists.
Their presence reminds us that “energy history” cannot be disentangled from military geography.
VI. A Grid That Ages Faster Than It Is Remembered
Across different decades, the same details repeat: salt eating through the base of poles, vegetation swallowing lines that were never trimmed on time, transformers working well beyond their intended load, substations vulnerable to seasonal flooding.
Bonilla’s phrase “tired infrastructures” feels almost understated.
More intriguing—and unsettling—is how routine the deterioration became.
Outages stopped functioning as events and blended into everyday life.
Oral histories after María recall this normalization long before the 2017 collapse (Bonilla & LeBrón, 2019).
VII. Maria as Exposure
The Boston University report (2022) offers a figure—$9.7B in damages—but numbers alone obscure the temporal depth of the collapse. María did not introduce fragility; it rendered it impossible to ignore.
A negative that had been forming for decades finally developed into a single, darkened image.
VIII. Privatization Without Structural Redesign
Public debates cast LUMA Energy or Genera PR as rupture, but the longer record suggests continuity. Administrative names shift; the grid remains recognizable in its vulnerabilities.
The exposed lines stay.
The fossil dependence stays.
The mismatched relationship between territory and infrastructure stays.
Language changes faster than steel.
IX. A Return to Territory
The Cooperativa Hidroeléctrica de la Montaña, in its attempts to revive old hydro sites, offers a form of historical re-reading: not nostalgia, but the recognition that earlier systems—grounded in place rather than scale—might contain clues for resilience.
Sometimes innovation is simply learning to ask the past different questions.
X. Closing Note (Unfinished by Design)
These notes trace only one segment of a larger story still being pieced together. Puerto Rico’s energy history crosses uneven terrains—environmental, military, administrative, and communal—and each leaves traces that rarely align neatly.
What comes next will depend on how well we learn to read those mismatches.
For now, the work continues between archives, interviews, and mountain roads where the documents remain visible in metal, salt, and silence.
REFERENCES
Bonilla, Y. (2015). Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment. University of Chicago Press.
Bonilla, Y., & LeBrón, M. (Eds.). (2019). Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. Haymarket Books.
Boston University Global Development Policy Center. (2022). The Future of Energy in Puerto Rico: Current Challenges and Opportunities for a Resilient Power Grid.
Cooperativa Hidroeléctrica de la Montaña. (n.d.). A Brief History of Puerto Rico’s Hydroelectric Plants.
McCaffrey, K. T. (2002). Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Rutgers University Press.
Picó, F. (2006). Historia general de Puerto Rico (4ta ed.). Ediciones Huracán.
Quintero Rivera, A. G. (1998). Salsa, sabor y control. Siglo Veintiuno Editores.
Scarano, F. (1993). Puerto Rico: Cinco siglos de historia. McGraw-Hill.
U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Legacy Management. (2009). BONUS, Puerto Rico, Decommissioned Reactor Site Fact Sheet.
U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2023). Puerto Rico Energy Profile.