Maldita Sea, Otro Apagón”: A Historical, Decolonial Analysis of the Puerto Rican Power Grid and the Making of the Energy Crisis

The Puerto Rican power grid is in crisis. Some of the highest electrical rates in the United States are paired with aging infrastructure, rolling blackouts and brownouts, and an overreliance on fossil fuels to create a system that is unsustainable for the people of Puerto Rico. To understand how the situation became this dire, this thesis explores the history of the power grid and the making of the energy crisis. Using a decolonizing perspective, this project investigates key moments from the 1930s through Hurricane Maria in 2017 to elucidate the role that American corporations and U.S. colonialism had in the making of this crisis. While some contemporary reports blame labor costs and poor debt management for the crisis, this thesis shows that the disaster in Puerto Rico is man-made by American colonialism and capitalism over the last century. Throughout every decade, deliberate choices by the federal government and American corporations led to the current crisis that Puerto Ricans are facing today.