Rooftop solar powers 10% of Puerto Rico’s electricity
More than 10% of electricity consumption in Puerto Rico now comes from rooftop solar power, a milestone that illustrates the continued rapid uptake of distributed solar as an alternative to the increasingly unreliable centralized grid.
According to data filed by private grid operator LUMA Energy, approximately 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of residential and commercial rooftop solar had been installed under Puerto Rico’s net metering regulations as of June 2025.
IEEFA estimates the rooftop systems will produce more than 1.8 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually. Using LUMA’s estimate of fiscal year 2025 sales and data on net metering exports to the grid, IEEFA estimates that the commercial and residential rooftop installations account for about 10.3% of Puerto Rico’s total electricity consumption. These statistics do not capture off-grid systems, meaning that the true amount of electricity provided by solar on the island is likely even higher.
Distributed generation has grown rapidly in Puerto Rico over the last decade; the [graphic above] shows how residential and commercial rooftop solar capacity has quintupled in just the last four years. Over the last year, residential and commercial solar systems have been added to the grid at a rate of almost 3,200 per month. LUMA projects installations to continue growing at a similar rate, reaching almost 2 GW of installed capacity by mid-2028.
The day-to-day unreliability of the grid and the threat of another catastrophic power outage like that provoked by Hurricane Maria in 2017 is a driving factor in these installations. The reliability of the grid has only gotten worse in recent years, with metrics for the frequency and duration of transmission and distribution system outages worsening from fiscal years 2023 to 2025; these metrics are many times worse than the U.S. average.
For this reason, approximately 83% of residential and commercial rooftop solar systems have battery storage so that they can continue operating during blackouts. These distributed batteries can also provide support to the grid. LUMA has created a program that pays participating customers with battery storage for LUMA to be able to centrally dispatch some of the energy stored in their batteries. During July 2025, LUMA was able to call on these resources to dispatch an average of about 40 MW of power during peak times. The rooftop systems have contributed to reduced load shedding (blackouts) during peak hours when there is not enough centralized generation capacity on the system to meet total demand.
The number of residential installations now tops 163,000, or about 12% of Puerto Rico’s total residential customers. The rapid growth of rooftop solar represents citizens voting with their feet to move away from a deteriorating grid. Unfortunately, rather than embracing the transition towards a decentralized grid, the Puerto Rican government is doubling down on centralized generation. Instead of planning and facilitating the installation of rooftop solar systems and bolstering the island’s resiliency to future severe storms, the government’s announcement of an RFP for 3 GW of large-scale power generation favoring natural gas would lock Puerto Ricans into decades of centralized infrastructure and price-volatile fossil fuel imports.
Cathy Kunkel ([email protected]) is an energy consultant for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
