HWNEWS
The Department of Energy kept the money and the sites. It dropped the 70 megawatt solar build that came with the original 2025 commitment, and left the door open to natural gas.
Puerto Rico's electric grid still runs mostly on oil that has to be shipped in, and the system has not fully recovered since Hurricanes Irma and Maria battered it in 2017. Last week the Department of Energy closed a $490 million loan to a subsidiary of Pattern Energy for 220 megawatts of battery storage in Arecibo and Santa Isabel, intended to back up more than 100,000 customers during chronic blackouts.
The dollar figure and the two coastal sites are the same as a January 2025 conditional commitment the Biden-era Loan Programs Office made to Pattern. The solar that came with that earlier deal is not. The 2025 commitment paired the two battery sites with a 70-megawatt solar build. The new loan, issued through the renamed Office of Energy Dominance Financing, dropped the solar and added room for natural gas.
The Office of Energy Dominance Financing is the new name for the Loan Programs Office under the Trump administration. As part of what DOE called an "exhaustive" review of Biden-era loan commitments, the department restructured, revised, or eliminated more than $83 billion in financing across the portfolio. Wind and solar are not in the Trump DOE's priority list. The Pattern loan survived the review; the solar portion did not.
Neither Pattern nor DOE has disclosed the size or scope of the natural gas piece. The loan documents describe "potential support" for gas-fired generation, according to Canary Media's reporting on the closing. Puerto Rico's government has separately backed new gas-fired plants. Gas, like the oil that still runs most of the island's grid, has to be imported by ship. The trade, in other words, is between a fuel Puerto Rico can build at home and one it still has to bring in.
Independent trade press has corroborated the loan and the battery sizing. The DOE press release is the primary federal record; the Canary Media piece is the original reporting on the unbundling.
The Pattern deal is one slice of a much larger reshuffle. The $83 billion review spans Biden-era commitments across wind, solar, storage, hydrogen, nuclear, and EV manufacturing, and the Trump DOE has continued the storage work while walking away from or downsizing the solar and wind. The continuing federal interest in storage tracks with what batteries actually do for a fragile, oil-dependent grid: they firm capacity during storms and unplanned outages, the moments when a centralized, fuel-imported system is most likely to fail. A 70-megawatt solar build would have displaced some of that oil-fired generation. Without it, the island's import bill and its exposure to shipping disruptions look much the way they did under the old plan.
The federal loan closed last week. The solar that was supposed to ride alongside it is not in the deal, and the gas component is the part DOE has not yet written down.