Connecticut’s members of Congress are calling for an investigation into the alleged misuse of federal funds intended to make Puerto Rico’s energy grid more resilient.
Democratic U.S. representatives from Connecticut, including John Larson, Rosa DeLauro and Joe Courtney, all signed a letter to U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright. In it, 46 members of Congress ask for a briefing to understand why the Trump administration has clawed back $715 million in federal funds since last fall.
Larson said the $1 billion Puerto Rico-Energy Resilience Fund, established by Congress in 2023, was intended to bolster many homes and businesses with private rooftop solar projects.
“That was designated to help power healthcare facilities, apartments and condos and keep the lights on for low income families and people,” Larson said.
The hope was to give energy independence to private citizens on the island, particularly during disaster recovery, and lessen the day-to-day energy issues as well.
Customers in Puerto Rico have the most grid interruptions anywhere in the U.S., according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. While the nationwide average is two hours of interruptions per year as of 2024, Puerto Rico residents experience 27 hours of outages a year — not including hurricane recovery periods. The next highest is similarly storm-prone Florida, where residents average 19 hours of interruptions a year.
DeLauro, who represents the Connecticut city with the second highest population of Boricuas in the state, saw the island’s energy issues firsthand after Hurricane Maria hit in 2017. She traveled to Puerto Rico in the months after, as most residents were still relying on generator power running on fossil fuels.
She said the Trump administration has yet to provide answers about the funding intended for the U.S. territory. The move comes as the administration has fought to halt other renewable energy projects, including several wind projects off the coast of New England.
“We're looking at Puerto Rico, which people [there] are all Americans. They’re disaster prone — many over the last several years. They have a weak electrical grid, and this is appropriated dollars,” said DeLauro of New Haven.
“You've got an island that is totally dependent on imported fossil fuels, and only 1% of Puerto Rico's energy is supplied from renewable resources,” DeLauro said.
U.S. EIA data show petroleum accounts for 58% of Puerto Rico’s energy use, followed by natural gas at 31% and coal at 10% in 2023. A recent study commissioned under the Biden administration found a switch to 100% renewable energy would produce more than tenfold Puerto Rico’s current and projected energy needs through 2050.
Where are the rescinded dollars going?
Congressman Larson represents the district including Hartford, the area home to the most Puerto Ricans in the state. More than a third of the city’s population is Puerto Rican, according to the latest data from the University of Connecticut’s Puerto Rican Studies Initiative. The congressman said the island, as well as more than 300,000 Connecticut residents with ties to Puerto Rico, have a right to know where the money is now going.
“Oftentimes,” he said, “the undertones here is that people won't mind that this is happening because it's Puerto Rico and it's not the mainland.”
On top of the outage issues, Puerto Ricans on the island already pay higher electric bills than most Americans and are now facing a potential rate hike that would bring energy costs to 14% higher than in Connecticut, a state consistently in the top 5 most expensive power bills in the country.
At the end of President Obama’s second term, he established a financial oversight board to pull Puerto Rico out of bankruptcy. In the decade since, that board has cut the island’s crushing debt to less than a quarter of what it was, but creditor negotiations continue.
The debt owed to Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, remains under debate. The oversight board recently proposed an energy-specific payment plan recouping $2.6 billion to PREPA, but bondholders want the full amount plus interest, or $12 billion.
The cost will fall to customers with an estimated 40% hike per kilowatt hour, bringing it to more than $0.32. By comparison, Connecticut averages just under $0.28 per kilowatt hour.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy redirected nearly $369 million of the Puerto Rico-Energy Resilience Fund from rooftop solar to PREPA.
“DOE did not make this decision lightly,” reads the DOE’s PR-ERF FAQ page. “After a comprehensive review, updated grid reliability data, and the emergency directives, DOE concluded that continuing to devote PR-ERF dollars to rooftop solar projects would exacerbate reliability issues with the distribution grid and only cover a very small segment of the population.”
Larson and other Democratic U.S. representatives say that money was “slated to help 175 small health care facilities serving 300,000 patients and apartment/condo settings serving over 400,000 residents.”
The DOE says PREPA will now use the grant money instead for advanced metering infrastructure, modernizing substations and stabilizing the grid system.
“It's a broader pattern of the Department of Energy indiscriminately canceling projects, and I might add that the Department of Energy's lawyers admitted in court that some of these cancellations were meant to punish so-called ‘blue states,’” said Congresswoman DeLauro.
What next?
Both DeLauro and Larson are not convinced they will get answers from U.S. Energy Secretary Wright. The letter signed by Larson and others requested a briefing from Secretary Wright be scheduled by “no later than 5:00pm on April 30, 2026,” and the members have yet to receive a response.
But Larson said his focus, anyway, is educating the masses.
“The recourse we have is speaking to people in the public and in the media to make them aware of this,” Larson said. “Otherwise, you get swept under the carpet.”
