Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime Show Highlights Puerto Rico's Power Grid Challenges
The power grid just had another rare Super Bowl moment.
Unlike the actual power outage which happened early in the second half of Super Bowl XLVII at the New Orleans Superdome 13 years ago, this “power grid” moment came courtesy of halftime performer Bad Bunny during the break in Sunday night’s NFL Championship between the New England Patriots and winning Seattle Seahawks. The Puerto Rican hip-hop superstar peppered his performance with numerous nods and homages to his native island’s history.
And that musical roll call contained a visual and musical passage about numerous devastating and enduring islandwide blackouts caused by hurricanes and earthquakes across Puerto Rico. So right there on the Levi’s Stadium field in Santa Clara, Calif., we saw “transformer explosions become part of the pyrotechnics,” as my T&D World colleague Jeff Postelwait noted in his story.
“As part of the show, dancers performing with Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known by the stage name Bad Bunny, dangled in mock line worker gear from four distribution lines, which sparked and appeared to “explode” with stage pyrotechnics during a musical crescendo,” Postelwait wrote.
Excuse us for our fan boy geek-ness but having a major musical star reference the power grid in any way, shape or form is worth a couple of “hey, kids look at that!” from those of us who cover this industry. As the annual International Lineman’s Rodeo event proves every year, there are countless linemen and linewoman who deserve All-Pro recognition.
Beyond the shoutout to Puerto Rico, though, Bad Bunny’s transformer pyrotechnics simply highlighted an ever-present tragedy in that U.S. territory.
Power outages are a terrible and regular occurrence in Puerto Rico. This sad and humbling problem is one which many in the microgrid industry are seeking to fix by breaking that island’s thinly stretched grid down to distributed and more resilient microgrids and on-site power resources.
Here at Microgrid Knowledge, we have covered numerous stories about microgrids in Puerto Rico. These include the works of many entities including sonnen, New Sun Road, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Crowley, Casa Pueblo, Eaton and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which until recently allocated hundreds of millions of dollars toward a more resilient Puerto Rican grid.
Last month, the Trump Administration scrapped $450 million of planned funding for grid resiliency programs in Puerto Rico. The cancellation was part of a larger termination of key parts of the $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resiliency Fund.
This decision by the Trump administration raised barely an eyebrow beyond the distributed power and energy equity sectors. It is not new for the current DOE to stop previous renewable energy programs originating from the Biden and Obama Administrations which the new leaders argue are inefficient and wasteful.
But, there it was last night at Levi’s Stadium, Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón” pulsating samba-style with the performers decked out atop poles as line workers trying to survive dangerous times on the grid.
This was not a political post, but how many times does your chosen profession get a Super Bowl shoutout? The last time was due to the “current” crisis such as the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII. That New Orleans power outage was real at that moment and caused a 30-plus minute delay in the game. It annoyed people.
At the very least, this Super Bowl halftime by Bad Bunny gave some visibility to the electricity sector. It was a symbolic, musical nod to earlier crises in Puerto Rico, some of which many football fans may never have known otherwise.
Either way, the power grid had a Super moment Sunday night.
About the Author
Rod Walton, Microgrid Knowledge Head of Content
Managing Editor
For Microgrid Knowledge editorial inquiries, please contact Managing Editor Rod Walton at [email protected].
I’ve spent the last 15 years covering the energy industry as a newspaper and trade journalist. I was an energy writer and business editor at the Tulsa World before moving to business-to-business media at PennWell Publishing, which later became Clarion Events, where I covered the electric power industry. I joined Endeavor Business Media in November 2021 to help launch EnergyTech, one of the company’s newest media brands. I joined Microgrid Knowledge in July 2023.
I earned my Bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. My career stops include the Moore American, Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, Wagoner Tribune and Tulsa World, all in Oklahoma . I have been married to Laura for the past 33-plus years and we have four children and one adorable granddaughter. We want the energy transition to make their lives better in the future.
Microgrid Knowledge and EnergyTech are focused on the mission critical and large-scale energy users and their sustainability and resiliency goals. These include the commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the military, universities, data centers and microgrids. The C&I sectors together account for close to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
Many large-scale energy users such as Fortune 500 companies, and mission-critical users such as military bases, universities, healthcare facilities, public safety and data centers, shifting their energy priorities to reach net-zero carbon goals within the coming decades. These include plans for renewable energy power purchase agreements, but also on-site resiliency projects such as microgrids, combined heat and power, rooftop solar, energy storage, digitalization and building efficiency upgrades.