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202395 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.202395 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2025 227 pages Doctoral Dissertation Academic theses en Rivera Matos, Yiamar Miller, Clark A. Haglund, LaDawn Richter, Jennifer Arizona State University Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2025 Field of study: Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology Puerto Rico’s energy crisis – exposed by Hurricane María and deepened by colonial governance, fossil fuel dependency, and neoliberal energy reforms – has driven a rapid turn to solar power. The island now adds over 3,000 new solar connections monthly. Yet, vulnerable communities continue to face significant hurdles in their efforts to leverage solar opportunities to strengthen their resilience, including exclusion from markets and policies, persistent energy insecurity and poverty, and limited access to renewable energy options. This dissertation asks a simple question: can community-led solar projects provide meaningful alternatives to Puerto Rico’s centralized energy regime, what stands in the way of such projects, and what conditions enable their success? Despite the hurdles that they face, a number of Puerto Rican communities are generating alternative pathways that creatively innovatively challenge extractive energy systems and reimagine what a just, locally rooted energy future can look like. Using critical ethnography, participatory observation, surveys, and storytelling, this dissertation investigates these community-led solar energy initiatives and their potential to serve as pathways for energy democracy, resilience, and justice. Grounded in a partnership with the rural community of Veguita Zama and the grassroots organization AMANESER 2025, this research explores what it means for one community to live in energy precarity, what that community is doing to try to change their relationship to an extractive energy system, the challenges their initiative has faced, and how they have worked to overcome those challenges. Building on the lessons from this community’s experiences, the dissertation argues that achieving an equitable energy future requires the redistribution of power through community-led governance, collective ownership, and culturally grounded participation – and it offers critical insights to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners into how community-led reimagination of power, ownership, and resilience can happen. Findings reveal that Puerto Rico’s energy transition is a technical, political and cultural process. The Veguita Zama case illustrates how local communities resist extractive, top-down energy regimes and experiment with decentralized solar projects to reclaim autonomy and ownership of both energy assets and their own energy futures. Their efforts to advance community ownership face persistent barriers: financial constraints, skepticism toward collective governance, and dominant market ideologies that marginalize local alternatives and permeate local media. Nonetheless, sometimes, communities succeed. Through a deeper understanding of why and how community solar projects work – and where they confront limits – this research contributes to theories of energy justice and democracy, decolonial energy, and grassroots energy innovation. Caribbean Studies Environmental Justice Social Research Rethinking Energy Systems through Solar Energy Innovation: Bottom-Up Insights from Puerto Rico's Energy Transition