Why We Are Leaving

The local office has been shut; the staff has moved to our new headquarters in Minnesota; the turbines in Puerto Rico have been given away.  An entirely Puerto Rican entity founded ten years ago with entirely Puerto Rican capital has now left the island entirely.

Our company’s goal has always been to invest in renewable energy.  The irony is that over the past ten years we have been able to do that successfully almost everywhere else in the world.  Through Aspenall and its affiliates we finance, build, operate and/or own renewable energy projects on every continent but Antartica.  And, of course, Puerto Rico.

Some of the entities we invest in – like M-Kopa or GEEREF – are leading examples of the many new and exciting ways that now exist to provide clean, sustainable energy.  And yet the discourse in Puerto Rico remains unchanged, endlessly repeating the same tired premises.  Many of them were used by the Junta in their Wall Street Journal article.  This is insane.

First, Puerto Rico is an island.  Electricity will never be cheap.  Look at Singapore; look at Ireland; look at Hawaii.  Benchmarking to Alabama is pure foolishness.  PREPA will be privatized not for the betterment of the island but because there is no other option, and if you cling to the idea of cheap energy when PREPA is privatized you will only relive what Puerto Rico went through when it tried to privatize PRASA – mutual accusations of deception and no real progress.  The Puerto Rican power grid suffers from thirty years of deferred maintenance, and almost all its power plants are coastal and will be impacted by rising sea levels.  To build an economic plan on cheaper electricity rates is an act of willful blindness.

Second – PREPA behaves the way it does because the Government allows it to do so.  We have been witness to four administrations refusing to implement their own laws while claiming impotence in the face of PREPA’s intransigence on topics ranging from renewable energy integration to regulation and oversight.  While the Junta hascarte blanche, it adheres to the same premises, and assigns to PREPA the same throbbing economic importance that has allowed PREPA to resist change for decades.  To this we can only reply – get out a little.  Travel the world.  Go to emerging markets, get a taste of what economic growth really looks like.

Is it possible to do business in a country in which the sovereign does not respect its own laws and contracts?  More to the point, is it proper? Is it moral to mortgage our children’s future to a country which has consistently favored outside players over local ones?   We think not.

We are leaving, in the end, because we feel we have a responsibility to fight climate change, and have been prevented from doing that here.  Sea levels are rising, the climate is changing.  We live now in a world where inaction has real and tangible consequences.

We will do what we can.  It will clearly not be from here.

• El autor es gerente de Aspenall Energies