Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
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I just published my first story in the MIT Technology Review.
It was also the first time I can ever recall crying while conducting an interview. In March, I flew down Puerto Rico and drove from San Juan to Guayama on the southern coast, where the island's lone coal plant is located. Amid setbacks in the reconstruction of the territory's grid and the buildout of large-scale renewables, the Puerto Rican government just extended the operating life of the coal plant as part of a broader investment in fossil fuels in a desperate bid to ease blackouts before the summer.
I went to a neighborhood of Guayama that was teeming with life -- bursting magenta bougainvilleas, roaming hogs trailed by little piglets, a chorus of birdsong. But there, I met Carmen Suárez Vázquez, who felt she was stalked by death.
Her house was dark and sealed in plastic to keep the outside air from getting in. Her mother had had 15 heart attacks. Her best friend had recently died. She herself had just gotten out of the hospital. But all of that paled in comparison to losing her youngest song, Edgardo, to a rare form of cancer she blamed on pollution from the coal plant. Sitting in her living room and listening to her talk about how he suffered and how he tried to protect her from the pain of watching his condition worsen genuinely broke my heart, especially as I prepared for the birth of my first child the following month.
Between 1990 and 2000—before the coal plant opened—Guayama had on average just over 103 cancer cases per year. In 2003, the year after the plant opened, the number of cancer cases in the municipality surged by 50%, to 167. In 2022, the most recent year with available data in Puerto Rico’s central cancer registry, cases hit a new high of 209—a more than 88% increase from the year AES started burning coal.
A study by University of Puerto Rico researchers found cancer, heart disease, and respiratory illnesses on the rise in the area. They suggested that proximity to the coal plant may be to blame, describing the “operation, emissions, and handling of coal ash from the company” as “a case of environmental injustice.”
You can read the story here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/17/1118216/puerto-rico-power-struggles-future/ 4 replies
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