According to the latest annual report from the energy think tank Ember, in 2025 clean energy supplied all of the net growth in global electricity demand. Solar power alone covered 75% of that growth; renewable sources surpassed a third of world generation for the first time, overtaking coal; and in China and India, countries that skeptics said “would never act,” fossil fuel generation fell for the first time.
That’s the starting point of a recent conversation between journalist Ezra Klein and environmentalist Bill McKibben that deserves attention in Puerto Rico. McKibben sums it up with a simple image: clean energy is no longer “the Whole Foods of energy”: virtuous, expensive, a luxury of conscience; it’s “the Costco of energy”: cheap, available in bulk, ready to install. According to McKibben, at some point this decade we crossed an invisible line: generating electricity by pointing a piece of glass at the sun became cheaper than generating it by burning something.
The examples are everywhere. China installs the equivalent of one large coal plant’s worth of solar panels every eight hours. For long stretches of most days, California generates more than 100% of its electricity from clean sources, and after nightfall the batteries that stored the afternoon’s solar energy are often the main source of supply; in three years, that state added storage capacity equivalent to twelve nuclear plants and cut the natural gas it uses to generate electricity by 60%. Australia produces so much surplus solar power at midday that generating companies give electricity away between noon and 3 p.m.
Three lessons for the island emerge from that conversation.
First, solar paired with storage is already the fundamental resource of a modern electric system. Battery costs have fallen so fast that any generation plan or procurement process at PREPA, LUMA, and Genera based on assumptions from just two years ago is obsolete and needs to be reassessed. Meanwhile, between 2023 and 2025 the cost of natural gas generation projects rose 66% and the time needed to bring them online increased 23%, according to BloombergNEF.
Second, the Strait of Hormuz crisis showed that dependence on imported fuel is not just an economic problem but a strategic vulnerability. Every solar panel and every battery installed in Puerto Rico works as insurance against price shocks and against disruptions in supply chains we don’t control.
Third, and most important, the obstacle is no longer technological or economic; it’s political and institutional. The pace of renewable technology development and basic economic efficiency both point to the same conclusion: the most effective strategy for lowering the electric bill is to speed up approval of utility-scale solar projects. The lack of progress in Puerto Rico is driven by the influence of fossil fuel companies and by institutional inertia.
In his latest book, McKibben writes that the Vatican is about to become the first state in the world whose energy derives entirely from the sun, and he offers a mantra for this era: “energy from heaven, not from hell.” On an island with more sun than most other places on the planet, with one of the most fragile grids and some of the highest electricity rates under the American flag, continuing to bet on imported fuel is sheer stubbornness. Energy abundance is here. What’s missing is the will to use it.
This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and reviewed by a human editor before publishing. The Spanish version of this column was originally published in El Nuevo DĂa on September 2, 2026.