At this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Bad Bunny did something few expected on one of the world’s biggest entertainment platforms: he sang “El Apagón,” his anthem about chronic power outages in Puerto Rico.
For energy watchers, it was a surreal moment. Grid reliability is usually discussed in regulatory filings, utility rate cases, or engineering reports, not under stadium lights, in front of tens of millions of viewers.
But the message landed because, for Puerto Ricans, blackouts are not abstract. They are a part of daily life.
Why the song resonates beyond the stage
“El Apagón” is more than a pop track. It’s a protest song about:
- Repeated power outages
- High electricity prices
- The slow pace of grid recovery after Hurricane Maria
- The social and economic toll of unreliable energy
Years after the 2017 storm devastated the island’s power system, many households and businesses still face frequent disruptions. At the same time, electricity prices remain among the highest in the United States, hovering around $0.24 per kWh.
This combination, of high costs and low reliability, creates pressure that goes far beyond inconvenience. It affects:
- Small businesses that can’t afford downtime
- Hospitals and clinics relying on backup power
- Households managing heat, food storage, and daily routines
- Schools and public services
In short, it turns energy from a background utility into a constant concern.
How the grid crisis fueled a solar boom
One of the most striking responses to the island’s unreliable grid has been a surge in rooftop solar and home batteries.
According to industry data cited by pv magazine USA and Wood Mackenzie:
- Puerto Rico reached 1.3 GW of residential solar
- More than 185,000 residential batteries were installed as of late last year
This means a significant share of households now rely on their own solar-plus-storage systems for resilience.
In many neighborhoods, rooftop systems now:
- Provide backup power during outages
- Reduce dependence on expensive grid electricity
- Act as the most reliable source of energy on the island
Interestingly, the residential segment has outpaced large, utility-scale projects. While front-of-the-meter solar and storage developments are now ramping up, households moved first because they had to.
It’s a rare case where grid failure directly accelerated distributed energy adoption at scale.
When energy becomes culture
Energy stories usually live in technical documents, not global entertainment events.
But Bad Bunny’s performance showed something important:
people connect to energy issues when they’re framed in human terms.
“El Apagón” translates roughly to “The Blackout,” and the song captures:
- Frustration with outages
- Anger over high bills
- Anxiety about the future of the island
That emotional framing reaches audiences that policy papers never will.
And it matters. Because the energy transition isn’t just about:
- Megawatts installed
- Capacity factors
- Grid interconnection queues
It’s also about:
- Trust in infrastructure
- Affordability
- Reliability
- Daily lived experience
A reminder for the energy industry
For utilities, regulators, and investors, Puerto Rico is often framed as:
- A resilience case study
- A distributed energy success story
- A testing ground for solar-plus-storage
All of that is true. But the halftime performance was a reminder that behind the data points are millions of people dealing with real disruptions.
And sometimes, it takes a global pop star to bring that reality into the spotlight.
