How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance

On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face “probes” per second, isolating eyes, noses, and mouths before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital fingerprints. Before people find their seats, they are matched against an on-premises database—tagged with names, membership tiers, and watch-list flags—that’s stored behind the church’s firewall.

Late one afternoon, a woman scrolls on her phone as she walks home from work. Unbeknownst to her, a complex algorithm has stitched together her social profiles, her private health records, and local veteran outreach lists. It flags her for past military service, chronic pain, opioid dependence, and high Christian belief, and then delivers an ad to her Facebook feed: “Struggling with pain? You’re not alone. Join us this Sunday.”

These hypothetical scenes reflect real capabilities increasingly woven into places of worship nationwide, where spiritual care and surveillance converge in ways few congregants ever realize. Where Big Tech’s rationalist ethos and evangelical spirituality once mixed like oil and holy water, this unlikely amalgam has given birth to an infrastructure already reshaping the theology of trust—and redrawing the contours of community and pastoral power in modern spiritual life.

An ecumenical tech ecosystem

The church is “a highly fragmented market that is one of the largest yet to fully adopt digital technology,” the company said in a statement by email. “While churches have a variety of goals to achieve their mission, they use Gloo to help them connect, engage with, and know their people on a deeper level.” 

Gloo was founded in 2013 by Scott and Theresa Beck. From the late 1980s through the 2000s, Scott was turning Blockbuster into a 3,500-store chain, taking Boston Market public, and founding Einstein Bros. Bagels before going on to seed and guide startups like Ancestry.com and HomeAdvisor. Theresa, an artist, has built a reputation creating collaborative, eco-minded workshops across Colorado and beyond. Together, they have recast pastoral care as a problem of predictive analytics and sold thousands of churches on the idea that spiritual health can be managed like customer engagement.

Think of Gloo as something like Salesforce but for churches: a behavioral analytics platform, powered by church-­generated insights, psychographic information, and third-party consumer data. The company prefers to refer to itself as “a technology platform for the faith ecosystem.” Either way, this information is integrated into its “State of Your Church” dashboard—an interface for the modern pulpit. The result is a kind of digital clairvoyance: a crystal ball for knowing whom to check on, whom to comfort, and when to act.

Thousands of churches have been sold on the idea that spiritual health can be managed like customer engagement.

Gloo ingests every one of the digital breadcrumbs a congregant leaves—how often you attend church, how much money you donate, which church groups you sign up for, which keywords you use in your online prayer requests—and then layers on third-party data (census demographics, consumer habits, even indicators for credit and health risks). Behind the scenes, it scores and segments people and groups—flagging who is most at risk of drifting, primed for donation appeals, or in need of pastoral care. On that basis, it auto-triggers tailored outreach via text, email, or in-app chat. All the results stream into the single dashboard, which lets pastors spot trends, test messaging, and forecast giving and attendance. Essentially, the system treats spiritual engagement like a marketing funnel.

Since its launch in 2013, Gloo has steadily increased its footprint, and it has started to become the connective tissue for the country’s fragmented religious landscape. According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, the US is home to around 370,000 distinct congregations. As of early 2025, according to figures provided by the company, Gloo held contracts with more than 100,000 churches and ministry leaders.

In 2024, the company secured a $110 million strategic investment, backed by “mission-aligned” investors ranging from a child-development NGO to a denominational finance group. That cemented its evolution from basic church services vendor to faith-tech juggernaut. 

It started snapping up and investing in a constellation of ministry tools—everything from automated sermon distribution to real-time giving and attendance analytics, AI-driven chatbots, and leadership content libraries. By layering these capabilities onto its core platform, the company has created a one-stop shop for churches that combines back-office services with member-engagement apps and psychographic insights to fully realize that unified “faith ecosystem.” 

And just this year, two major developments brought this strategy into sharper focus.

In March 2025, Gloo announced that former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger—who has served as its chairman of the board since 2018—would assume an expanded role as executive chair and head of technology. Gelsinger, whom the company describes as “a great long-term investor and partner,” is a technologist whose fingerprints are on Intel’s and VMware’s biggest innovations.

(It is worth noting that Intel shareholders have filed a lawsuit against Gelsinger and CFO David Zinsner seeking to claw back roughly $207 million in compensation to Gelsinger, alleging that between 2021 and 2023, he repeatedly misled investors about the health of Intel Foundry Services.)

The same week Gloo announced Gelsinger’s new role, it unveiled a strategic investment in Barna Group, the Texas-based research firm whose four decades of surveying more than 2 million self-identified Christians underpin its annual reports on worship, beliefs, and cultural engagement. Barna’s proprietary database—covering every region, age cohort, and denomination—has made it the go-to insight engine for pastors, seminaries, and media tracking the pulse of American faith.

“We’ve been acquiring about a company a month into the Gloo family, and we expect that to continue,” Gelsinger told MIT Technology Review in June. “I’ve got three meetings this week on different deals we’re looking at.” (A Gloo spokesperson declined to confirm the pace of acquisitions, stating only that as of April 30, 2025, the company had fully acquired or taken majority ownership in 15 “mission-aligned companies.”)

“The idea is, the more of those we can bring in, the better we can apply the platform,” Gelsinger said. “We’re already working with companies with decades of experience, but without the scale, the technology, or the distribution we can now provide.”

MICHAEL BYERS

In particular, Barna’s troves of behavioral, spiritual, and cultural data offer granular insight into the behaviors, beliefs, and anxieties of faith communities. While the two organizations frame the collaboration in terms of serving church leaders, the mechanics resemble a data-fusion engine of impressive scale: Barna supplies the psychological texture, and Gloo provides the digital infrastructure to segment, score, and deploy the information.

In a promotional video from 2020 that is no longer available online, Gloo claimed to provide “the world’s first big-data platform centered around personal growth,” promising pastors a 360-degree view of congregants, including flags for substance use or mental-health struggles. Or, as the video put it, “Maximize your capacity to change lives by leveraging insights from big data, understand the people you want to serve, reach them earlier, and turn their needs into a journey toward growth.”

Gloo is also now focused on supercharging its services with artificial intelligence and using these insights to transcend market research. The company aims to craft AI models that aren’t just trained on theology but anticipate the moments when people’s faith—and faith leaders’ outreach—matters most. At a September 2024 event in Boulder called the AI & the Church Hackathon, Gloo unveiled new AI tools called Data Engine, a content management system with built-in digital-rights safeguards, and Aspen, an early prototype of its “spiritually safe” chatbot, along with the faith-tuned language model powering that chatbot, known internally as CALLM (for “Christian-Aligned Large Language Model”). 

More recently, the company released what it calls “Flourishing AI Standards,” which score large language models on their alignment with seven dimensions of well-­being: relationships, meaning, happiness, character, finances, health, and spirituality. Co-developed with Barna Group and Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, the benchmark draws on a thousand-plus-item test bank and the Global Flourishing Study, a $40 million, 22-nation project being carried out by the Harvard program, Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, Gallup, and the Center for Open Science.

Gelsinger calls the study “one of the most significant bodies of work around this question of values in decades.” It’s not yet clear how collecting information of this kind at such scale could ultimately affect the boundary between spiritual care and data commerce. One thing is certain, though: A rich vein of donation and funding could be at stake.

“Money’s already being spent here,” he said. “Donated capital in the US through the church is around $300 billion. Another couple hundred billion beyond that doesn’t go through the church. A lot of donors have capital out there, and we’re a generous nation in that regard. If you put the flourishing-­related economics on the table, now we’re talking about $1 trillion. That’s significant economic capacity. And if we make that capacity more efficient, that’s big.” In secular terms, it’s a customer data life cycle. In faith tech, it could be a conversion funnel—one designed not only to save souls, but to shape them. 

One of Gloo’s most visible partnerships was between 2022 and 2023 with the nonprofit He Gets Us, which ran a billion-dollar media campaign aimed at rebranding Jesus for a modern audience. The project underlined that while Gloo presents its services as tools for connection and support, their core functionality involves collecting and analyzing large amounts of congregational data. When viewers who saw the ads on social media or YouTube clicked through, they landed on prayer request forms, quizzes, and church match tools, all designed to gather personal details. Gloo then layered this raw data over Barna’s decades of behavioral research, turning simple inputs—email, location, stated interests—into what the company presented as multidimensional spiritual profiles. The final product offered a level of granularity no single congregation could achieve on its own.  

Though Gloo still lists He Gets Us on its platform, the nonprofit Come Near, which has since taken over the campaign, says it has terminated Gloo’s involvement. Still, He Gets Us led to one of Gloo’s most prized relationships by sparking interest from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a 229-year-old denomination with deep historical roots in the abolitionist and civil rights movements. In 2023, the church formalized a partnership with Gloo, and in late 2024 it announced that all 1,600 of its US congregations—representing roughly 1.5 million members—would begin using the company’s State of Your Church dashboard. 

In a 2024 press release issued by Gloo, AME Zion acknowledged that while the denomination had long tracked traditional metrics like membership growth, Sunday turnout, and financial giving, it had limited visibility into the deeper health of its communities.

“Until now, we’ve lacked the insight to understand how church culture, people, and congregations are truly doing,” said the Reverend J. Elvin Sadler, the denomination’s general secretary-auditor. “The State of Your Church dashboards will give us a better sense of the spirit and language of the culture (ethos), and powerful new tools to put in the hands of every pastor.”

The rollout marked the first time a major US denomination had deployed Gloo’s framework at scale. For Gloo, the partnership unlocked a real-time, longitudinal data stream from a nationwide religious network, something the company had never had before. It not only validated Gloo’s vision of data-driven ministry but also positioned AME Zion as what the company hopes will be a live test case, persuading other denominations to follow suit.

The digital supply chain

The digital infrastructure of modern churches often begins with intimacy: a prayer request, a small-group sign-up, a livestream viewed in a moment of loneliness. But beneath these pastoral touchpoints lies a sophisticated pipeline that increasingly mirrors the attention-economy engines of Silicon Valley.

Charles Kriel, a filmmaker who formerly served as a special advisor to the UK Parliament on disinformation, data, and addictive technology, has particular insight into that connection. Kriel has been working for over a decade on issues related to preserving democracy and countering digital surveillance. He helped write the UK’s Online Safety Act, joining forces with many collaborators, including the Nobel Peace Prize–­winning journalist Maria Ressa and former UK tech minister Damian Collins, in an attempt to rein in Big Tech in the late 2010s.

His 2020 documentary film, People You May Know, investigated how data firms like Gloo and their partners harvest intimate personal information from churchgoers to build psychographic profiles, highlighting how this sensitive data is commodified and raising questions about its potential downstream uses.

“Listen, any church with an app? They probably didn’t build that. It’s white label,” Kriel says, referring to services produced by one company and rebranded by another. “And the people who sold it to them are collecting data.”

Many churches now operate within a layered digital environment, where first-party data collected inside the church is combined with third-party consumer data and psychographic segmentation before being fed into predictive systems. These systems may suggest sermons people might want to view online, match members with small groups, or trigger outreach when engagement drops. 

In some cases, monitoring can even take the form of biometric surveillance.

In 2014, an Israeli security-tech veteran named Moshe Greenshpan brought airport-grade facial recognition into church entryways. Face-Six, the surveillance suite from the company he founded in 2012, already protected banks and hospitals; its most provocative offshoot, FA6 Events (also known as “Churchix”), repurposes this technology for places of worship.

Greenshpan claims he didn’t originally set out to sell to churches. But over time, as he became increasingly aware of the market, he built FA6 Events as a bespoke solution for them. Today, Greenshpan says, it’s in use at over 200 churches worldwide, nearly half of them in the US.

In practice, FA6 transforms every entryway into a biometric checkpoint: an instant headcount, a security sweep, and a digital ledger of attendance, all incorporated into the familiar routine of Sunday worship. 

When someone steps into an FA6-equipped place of worship, a discreet camera mounted at eye level springs to life. Behind the scenes, each captured image is run through a lightning-fast face detector that looks at the whole face. The subject’s cropped face is then aligned, resized, and rotated so the eyes sit on a perfect horizontal line before being fed into a compact neural network. 

“To the best of my knowledge, no church notifies its congregants that it’s using facial recognition.”

Moshe Greenshpan, Israeli security-tech veteran

This onboard neural network quickly captures the features of a person’s face in a unique digital signature called an embedding, allowing for quick identification. These embeddings are compared with thousands of others that are already in the church’s local database, each one tagged with data points like a name, a membership role, or even a flag designating inclusion in an internal watch list. If the match is strong enough, the system makes an identification and records the person’s presence on the church’s secure server.

A congregation can pull full attendance logs, time-stamped entry records, and—critically—alerts whenever someone on a watch list walks through the doors. In this context, a watch list is simply a roster of photos, and sometimes names, of individuals a church has been asked (or elected) to screen out: past disruptors, those subject to trespass or restraining orders, even registered sex offenders. Once that list is uploaded into Churchix, the system instantly flags any match on arrival, pinging security teams or usher staff in real time. Some churches lean on it to spot longtime members who’ve slipped off the radar and trigger pastoral check-ins; others use it as a hard barrier, automatically denying entry to anyone on their locally maintained list.

None of this data is sent to the cloud; Greenshpan says the company is actively working on a cloud-based application. Instead, all face templates and logs are stored locally on church-owned hardware, encrypted so they can’t be read if someone gains unauthorized access. 

Churches can export data from Churchix, he says, but the underlying facial templates remain on premises. 

Still, Greenshpan admits, robust technical safeguards do not equal transparency.

“To the best of my knowledge,” he says, “no church notifies its congregants that it’s using facial recognition.”

If the tools sound invasive, the logic behind them is simple: The more the system knows about you, the more precisely it can intervene.

“Every new member of the community within a 20-mile radius—whatever area you choose—we’ll send them a flier inviting them to your church,” Gloo’s Gelsinger says. 

It’s a tech-powered revival of the casserole ministry. The system pings the church when someone new moves in—“so someone can drop off cookies or lasagna when there’s a newborn in the neighborhood,” he says. “Or just say ‘Hey, welcome. We’re here.’”

Gloo’s back end automates follow-up, too: As soon as a pastor steps down from the pulpit after delivering a sermon, it can be translated into five languages, broken into snippets for small-group study, and repackaged into a draft discussion guide—ready within the hour.

Gelsinger sees the same approach extending to addiction recovery ministries. “We can connect other databases to help churches with recovery centers reach people more effectively,” he says. 

But the data doesn’t stay within the congregation. It flows through customer relationship management (CRM) systems, application programming interfaces, cloud servers, vendor partnerships, and analytics firms. Some of it is used internally in efforts to increase engagement; the rest is repackaged as “insights” and resold to the wider faith-tech marketplace—and sometimes even to networks that target political ads.

“We measured prayer requests. Call it crazy. But it was like, ‘We’re sitting on mounds of information that could help us steward our people.’”

Matt Engel, Gloo

 “There is a very specific thing that happens when churches become clients of Gloo,” says Brent Allpress, an academic based in Melbourne, Australia, who was a key researcher on People You May Know. Gloo gets access to the client church’s databases, he says, and the church “is strongly encouraged to share that data. And Gloo has a mechanism to just hoover that data straight up into their silo.” 

This process doesn’t happen automatically; the church must opt in by pushing those files or connecting its church-management software system’s database to Gloo via API. Once it’s uploaded, however, all that first-party information lands in Gloo’s analytics engine, ready to be processed and shared with any downstream tools or partners covered by the church’s initial consent to the terms and conditions of its contract with the company.

“There are religious leaders at the mid and local level who think the use of data is good. They’re using data to identify people in need. Addicts, the grieving,” says Kriel. “And then you have tech people running around misquoting the Bible as justification for their data harvest.” 

Matt Engel, who held the title executive director of ministry innovation at Gloo when Kriel’s film was made, acknowledged the extent of this harvest in the opening scene.  

“We measured prayer requests. Call it crazy. But it was like, ‘We’re sitting on mounds of information that could help us steward our people,’” he said in an on-camera interview. 

According to Engel—whom Gloo would not make available for public comment—uploading data from anonymous prayer requests to the cloud was Gloo’s first use case.

Powering third-party initiatives

But Gloo’s data infrastructure doesn’t end with its own platform; it also powers third-party initiatives.

Communio, a Christian nonprofit focused on marriage and family, used Gloo’s data infrastructure in order to launch “Communio Insights,” a stripped-down version of Gloo’s full analytics platform. 

Unlike Gloo Insights, which provides access to hundreds of demographic, behavioral, health, and psychographic filters, Communio Insights focuses narrowly on relational metrics—indicators of marriage and family stress, involvement in small groups at church—and basic demographic data. 

At the heart of its playbook is a simple, if jarring, analogy.

“If you sell consumer products of different sorts, you’re trying to figure out good ways to market that. And there’s no better product, really, than the gospel,” J.P. De Gance, the founder and president of Communio, said in People You May Know.

Communio taps Gloo’s analytics engine—leveraging credit histories, purchasing behavior, public voter rolls, and the database compiled by i360, an analytics company linked to the conservative Koch network—to pinpoint unchurched couples in key regions who are at risk of relationship strain. It then runs microtargeted outreach (using direct mail, text messaging, email, and Facebook Custom Audiences, a tool that lets organizations find and target people who have interacted with them), collecting contact info and survey responses from those who engage. All responses funnel back into Gloo’s platform, where churches monitor attendance, small-group participation, baptisms, and donations to evaluate the campaign’s impact.

MICHAEL BYERS

Investigative research by Allpress reveals significant concerns around these operations.  

In 2015, two nonprofits—the Relationship Enrichment Collaborative (REC), staffed by former Gloo executives, and its successor, the Culture of Freedom Initiative (now Communio), controlled by the Koch-affiliated nonprofit Philanthropy Roundtable—funded the development of the original Insights platform. Between 2015 and 2017, REC paid approximately $1.3 million to Gloo and $535,000 to Cambridge Analytica, the consulting firm notorious for harvesting Facebook users’ personal data and using it for political targeting before the 2016 election, to build and refine psychographic models and a bespoke digital ministry app powering Gloo’s outreach tools. Following REC’s closure, the Culture of Freedom Initiative invested another $375,000 in Gloo and $128,225 in Cambridge Analytica. 

REC’s own 2016 IRS filing describes the work in terse detail: “Provide[d] digital micro-targeted marketing for churches and non-profit champions … using predictive modeling and centralized data analytics we help send the right message to the right couple at the right time based upon their desires and behaviors.”

On top of all this documented research, Allpress exposed another critical issue: the explicit use of sensitive health-care data. 

He found that Gloo Insights combines over 2,000 data points—drawing on everything from nationwide credit and purchasing histories to church management records and Christian psychographic surveys—with filters that make it possible to identify people with health issues such as depression, anxiety, and grief. The result: Facebook Custom Audiences built to zero in on vulnerable individuals via targeted ads.

These ads invite people suffering from mental-health conditions into church counseling groups “as a pathway to conversion,” Allpress says.

These targeted outreach efforts were piloted in cities including Phoenix, Arizona; Dayton, Ohio; and Jacksonville, Florida. Reportedly, as many as 80% of those contacted responded positively, with those who joined a church as new members contributing financially at above-­average rates. In short, Allpress found that pastoral tools had covertly exploited mental-health vulnerabilities and relationship crises for outreach that blurred the lines separating pastoral care, commerce, and implicit political objectives.

The legal and ethical vacuum

Developers of this technology earnestly claim that the systems are designed to enhance care, not exploit people’s need for it. They’re described as ways to tailor support to individual needs, improve follow-up, and help churches provide timely resources. But experts say that without robust data governance or transparency around how sensitive information is used and retained, well-­intentioned pastoral technology could slide into surveillance.

In practice, these systems have already been used to surveil and segment congregations. Internal demos and client testimonials confirm that Gloo, for example, uses “grief” as an explicit data point: Churches run campaigns aimed at people flagged for recent bereavement, depression, or anxiety, funneling them into support groups and identifying them for pastoral check-ins. 

Examining Gloo’s terms and conditions reveals further security and transparency concerns. From nearly a dozen documents, ranging from “click-through” terms for interactive services to master service agreements at the enterprise level, Gloo stitches together a remarkably consistent data-­governance framework. Limits are imposed on any legal action by individual congregants, for example. The click-through agreement corrals users into binding arbitration, bars any class action suits or jury trials, and locks all disputes into New York or Colorado courts, where arbitration is particularly favored over traditional litigation. Meanwhile, its privacy statement carves out broad exceptions for service providers, data-­enrichment partners, and advertising affiliates, giving them carte blanche to use congregants’ data as they see fit. Crucially, Gloo expressly reserves the right to ingest “health and wellness information” provided via wellness assessments or when mental-health keywords appear in prayer requests. This is a highly sensitive category of information that, for health apps, is normally covered by stringent medical-privacy rules like HIPAA.

In other words, Gloo is protected by sprawling legal scaffolding, while churches and individual users give up nearly every right to litigate, question data practices, or take collective action. 

“We’re kind of in the Wild West in terms of the law,” says Adam Schwartz, the director of privacy litigation at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the nonprofit watchdog that has spent years wrestling tech giants over data abuses and biometric overreach. 

In the United States, biometric surveillance like that used by growing numbers of churches inhabits a legal twilight zone where regulation is thin, patchy, and often toothless. Schwartz points to Illinois as a rare exception for its Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), one of the nation’s strongest such laws. The statute applies to any organization that captures biometric identifiers—including retina or iris scans, fingerprints, voiceprints, hand scans, facial geometry, DNA, and other unique biological information. It requires entities to post clear data-collection policies, obtain explicit written consent, and limit how long such data is retained. Failure to comply can expose organizations to class action lawsuits and steep statutory damages—up to $5,000 per violation.

But beyond Illinois, protections quickly erode. Though Texas and Washington also have biometric privacy statutes, their bark is stronger than their bite. Efforts to replicate Illinois’s robust protections have been made in over a dozen states—but none have passed. As a result, in much of the country, any checks on biometric surveillance depend more on voluntary transparency and goodwill than any clear legal boundary.

“There is a real potential for information gathered about a person [to] be used against them in their life outside the church.”

Emily Tucker, Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law

That’s especially problematic in the church context, says Emily Tucker, executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, who attended divinity school before becoming a legal scholar. “The necessity of privacy for the possibility of finding personal relationship to the divine—for engaging in rituals of worship, for prayer and penitence, for contemplation and spiritual struggle—is a fundamental principle across almost every religious tradition,” she says. “Imposing a surveillance architecture over the faith community interferes radically with the possibility of that privacy, which is necessary for the creation of sacred space.”

Tucker researches the intersection of surveillance, civil rights, and marginalized communities. She warns that the personal data being collected through faith-tech platforms is far from secure: “Because corporate data practices are so poorly regulated in this country, there are very few limitations on what companies that take your data can subsequently do with it.”

To Tucker, the risks of these platforms outweigh the rewards—especially when biometrics and data collected in a sacred setting could follow people into their daily lives. “Many religious institutions are extremely large and often perform many functions in a given community besides providing a space for worship,” she says. “Many churches, for example, are also employers or providers of social services. There is a real potential for information gathered about a person in their associational activities as a member of a church to then be used against them in their life outside the church.”  

She points to government dragnet surveillance, the use of IRS data in immigration enforcement, and the vulnerability of undocumented congregants as examples of how faith-tech data could be weaponized beyond its intended use: “Religious institutions are putting the safety of those members at risk by adopting this kind of surveillance technology, which exposes so much personal information to potential abuse and misuse.” 

Schwartz, too, says that any perceived benefits must be weighed carefully against the potential harms, especially when sensitive data and vulnerable communities are involved.

“Churches: Before doing this, you ought to consider the downside, because it can hurt your congregants,” he says.  

With guardrails still scarce, though, faith-tech pioneers and church leaders are peering ever more deeply into congregants’ lives. Until meaningful oversight arrives, the faithful remain exposed to a gaze they never fully invited and scarcely understand.

In April, Gelsinger took the stage at a sold-out Missional AI Summit, a flagship event for Christian technologists that this year was organized around the theme “AI Collision: Shaping the Future Together.” Over 500 pastors, engineers, ethicists, and AI developers filled the hall, flashing badges with logos from Google DeepMind, Meta, McKinsey, and Gloo.

“We want to be part of a broader community … so that we’re influential in creating flourishing AI, technology as a force for good, AI that truly embeds the values that we care about,” Gelsinger said at the summit. He likened such tools to pivotal technologies in Christian history: the Roman roads that carried the gospel across the empire, or Martin Luther’s printing press, which shattered monolithic control over scripture. A Gloo spokesperson later confirmed that one of the company’s goals is to shape AI specifically to “contribute to the flourishing of people.”

“We’re going to see AI become just like the internet,” Gelsinger said. “Every single interaction will be infused with AI capabilities.” 

He says Gloo is already mining data across the spectrum of human experience to fuel ever more powerful tools.

“With AI, computers adapt to us. We talk to them; they hear us; they see us for the first time,” he said. “And now they are becoming a user interface that fits with humanity.”

Whether these technologies ultimately deepen pastoral care or erode personal privacy may hinge on decisions made today about transparency, consent, and accountability. Yet the pace of adoption already outstrips the development of ethical guardrails. Now, one of the questions lingering in the air is not whether AI, facial recognition, and other emerging technologies can serve the church, but how deeply they can be woven into its nervous system to form a new OS for modern Christianity and moral infrastructure. 

“It’s like standing on the beach watching a tsunami in slow motion,” Kriel says. 

Gelsinger sees it differently.  

“You and I both need to come to the same position, like Isaiah did,” he told the crowd at the Missional AI Summit. “‘Here am I, Lord. Send me.’ Send me, send us, that we can be shaping technology as a force for good, that we could grab this moment in time.” 

Alex Ashley is a journalist whose reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, NPR, and other national outlets.

Puerto Rico’s power struggles

At first glance, it seems as if life teems around Carmen Suárez Vázquez’s little teal-painted house in the municipality of Guayama, on Puerto Rico’s southeastern coast.

The edge of the Aguirre State Forest, home to manatees, reptiles, as many as 184 species of birds, and at least three types of mangrove trees, is just a few feet south of the property line. A feral pig roams the neighborhood, trailed by her bumbling piglets. Bougainvillea blossoms ring brightly painted houses soaked in Caribbean sun.

Yet fine particles of black dust coat the windowpanes and the leaves of the blooming vines. Because of this, Suárez Vázquez feels she is stalked by death. The dust is in the air, so she seals her windows with plastic to reduce the time she spends wheezing—a sound that has grown as natural in this place as the whistling croak of Puerto Rico’s ubiquitous coquí frog. It’s in the taps, so a watercooler and extra bottles take up prime real estate in her kitchen. She doesn’t know exactly how the coal pollution got there, but she is certain it ended up in her youngest son, Edgardo, who died of a rare form of cancer.

And she believes she knows where it came from. Just a few minutes’ drive down the road is Puerto Rico’s only coal-fired power station, flanked by a mountain of toxic ash.

The plant, owned by the utility giant AES, has long plagued this part of Puerto Rico with air and water pollution. During Hurricane Maria in 2017, powerful winds and rain swept the unsecured pile—towering more than 12 stories high—out into the ocean and the surrounding area. Though the company had moved millions of tons of ash around Puerto Rico to be used in construction and landfill, much of it had stayed in Guayama, according to a 2018 investigation by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. Last October, AES settled with the US Environmental Protection Agency over alleged violations of groundwater rules, including failure to properly monitor wells and notify the public about significant pollution levels. 

Governor Jenniffer González-Colón has signed a new law rolling back the island’s clean-energy statute, completely eliminating its initial goal of 40% renewables by 2025.

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.”

Seemingly everyone Suárez Vázquez knows has some kind of health problem. Nearly every house on her street has someone who’s sick, she told me. Her best friend, who grew up down the block, died of cancer a year ago, aged 55. Her mother has survived 15 heart attacks. Her own lungs are so damaged she requires a breathing machine to sleep at night, and she was forced to quit her job at a nearby pharmaceutical factory because she could no longer make it up and down the stairs without gasping for air. 

Neighbors have helped her install solar panels and batteries on the roof of her home, helping to offset the cost of running her air conditioner, purifier, and breathing machine. They also allow the devices to operate even when the grid goes down—as it still does multiple times a week, nearly eight years after Hurricane Maria laid waste to Puerto Rico’s electrical infrastructure.

ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN

Suárez Vázquez had hoped that relief would be on the way by now. That the billions of dollars Congress designated for fixing the island’s infrastructure would have made solar panels ubiquitous. That AES’s coal plant, which for nearly a quarter century has supplied up to 20% of the old, faulty electrical grid’s power, would be near its end—its closure had been set for late 2027. That the Caribbean’s first virtual power plant—a decentralized network of solar panels and batteries that could be remotely tapped into and used to balance the grid like a centralized fuel-burning station—would be well on its way to establishing a new model for the troubled island. 

Puerto Rico once seemed to be on that path. In 2019, two years after Hurricane Maria sent the island into the second-longest blackout in world history, the Puerto Rican government set out to make its energy system cheaper, more resilient, and less dependent on imported fossil fuels, passing a law that set a target of 100% renewable energy by 2050. Under the Biden administration, a gas company took charge of Puerto Rico’s power plants and started importing liquefied natural gas (LNG), while the federal government funded major new solar farms and programs to install panels and batteries on rooftops across the island. 

Now, with Donald Trump back in the White House and his close ally Jenniffer González-Colón serving as Puerto Rico’s governor, America’s largest unincorporated territory is on track for a fossil-fuel resurgence. The island quietly approved a new gas power plant in 2024, and earlier this year it laid out plans for a second one. Arguing that it was the only way to avoid massive blackouts, the governor signed legislation to keep Puerto Rico’s lone coal plant open for at least another seven years and potentially more. The new law also rolls back the island’s clean-energy statute, completely eliminating its initial goals of 40% renewables by 2025 and 60% by 2040, though it preserves the goal of reaching 100% by 2050. At the start of April, González-Colón issued an executive order fast-­tracking permits for new fossil-fuel plants. 

In May the new US energy secretary, Chris Wright, redirected $365 million in federal funds the Biden administration had committed to solar panels and batteries to instead pay for “practical fixes and emergency activities” to improve the grid.

It’s all part of a desperate effort to shore up Puerto Rico’s grid before what’s forecast to be a hotter-than-­average summer—and highlights the thorny bramble of bureaucracy and business deals that prevents the territory’s elected government from making progress on the most basic demand from voters to restore some semblance of modern American living standards.

Puerto Ricans already pay higher electricity prices than most other American citizens, and Luma Energy, the private company put in charge of selling and distributing power from the territory’s state-owned generating stations four years ago, keeps raising rates despite ongoing outages. In April González-Colón moved to crack down on Luma, whose contract she pledged to cancel on the campaign trail, though it remains unclear how she will find a suitable replacement. 

ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN

ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN

At the same time, she’s trying to enforce a separate contract with New Fortress Energy, the New York–based natural-gas company that gained control of Puerto Rico’s state-owned power plants in a hotly criticized privatization deal in 2023—all while the company is pushing to build more gas-fired generating stations to increase the island’s demand for liquefied natural gas. Just weeks before the coal plant won its extension, New Fortress secured a deal to sell even more LNG to Puerto Rico—despite the company’s failure to win federal permits for a controversial import terminal in San Juan Bay, already in operation, that critics fear puts the most densely populated part of the island at major risk, with no real plan for what to do if something goes wrong.

Those contracts infamously offered Luma and New Fortress plenty of carrots in the form of decades-long deals and access to billions of dollars in federal reconstruction money, but few sticks the Puerto Rican government could wield against them when ratepayers’ lights went out and prices went up. In a sign of how dim the prospects for improvement look, New Fortress even opted in March to forgo nearly $1 billion in performance bonuses over the next decade in favor of getting $110 million in cash up front. Spending any money to fix the problems Puerto Rico faces, meanwhile, requires approval from an unelected fiscal control board that Congress put in charge of the territory’s finances during a government debt crisis nearly a decade ago, further reducing voters’ ability to steer their own fate. 

AES declined an interview with MIT Technology Review and did not respond to a detailed list of emailed questions. Neither New Fortress nor a spokesperson for González-Colón responded to repeated requests for comment. 

“I was born on Puerto Rico’s Emancipation Day, but I’m not liberated because that coal plant is still operating,” says Alberto Colón, 75, a retired public school administrator who lives across the street from Suárez Vázquez, referring to the holiday that celebrates the abolition of slavery in what was then a Spanish colony. “I have sinus problems, and I’m lucky. My wife has many, many health problems. It’s gotten really bad in the last few years. Even with screens in the windows, the dust gets into the house.”

El problema es la colonia

What’s happening today in Puerto Rico began long before Hurricane Maria made landfall over the territory, mangling its aging power lines like a metal Slinky in a blender. 

The question for anyone who visits this place and tries to understand why things are the way they are is: How did it get this bad? 

The complicated answer is a story about colonialism, corruption, and the challenges of rebuilding an island that was smothered by debt—a direct consequence of federal policy changes in the 1990s. Although they are citizens, Puerto Ricans don’t have votes that count in US presidential elections. They don’t typically pay US federal income taxes, but they also don’t benefit fully from federal programs, receiving capped block grants that frequently run out. Today the island has even less control over its fate than in years past and is entirely beholden to a government—the US federal government—that its 3.2 million citizens had no part in choosing.

What’s happening today in Puerto Rico began long before Hurricane Maria made landfall over the territory, mangling its aging power lines like a metal Slinky in a blender.

A phrase that’s ubiquitous in graffiti on transmission poles and concrete walls in the towns around Guayama and in the artsy parts of San Juan places the blame deep in history: El problema es la colonia—the problem is the colony.

By some measures, Puerto Rico is the world’s oldest colony, officially established under the Spanish crown in 1508. The US seized the island as a trophy in 1898 following its victory in the Spanish-American War. In the grips of an expansionist quest to place itself on par with European empires, Washington pried Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines away from Madrid, granting each territory the same status then afforded to the newly annexed formerly independent kingdom of Hawaii. Acolytes of President William McKinley saw themselves as accepting what the Indian-born British poet Rudyard Kipling called “the white man’s burden”—the duty to civilize his subjects.

Although direct military rule lasted just two years, Puerto Ricans had virtually no say over the civil government that came to power in 1900, in which the White House appointed the governor. That explicitly colonial arrangement ended only in 1948 with the first island-wide elections for governor. Even then, the US instituted a gag law just months before the election that would remain in effect for nearly a decade, making agitation for independence illegal. Still, the following decades were a period of relative prosperity for Puerto Rico. Money from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal had modernized the island’s infrastructure, and rural farmers flocked to bustling cities like Ponce and San Juan for jobs in the burgeoning manufacturing sector. The pharmaceutical industry in particular became a major employer. By the start of the 21st century, Pfizer’s plant in the Puerto Rican town of Barceloneta was the largest Viagra manufacturer in the world.

But in 1996, Republicans in Congress struck a deal with President Bill Clinton to phase out federal tax breaks that had helped draw those manufacturers to Puerto Rico. As factories closed, the jobs that had built up the island’s middle class disappeared. To compensate, the government hired more workers as teachers and police officers, borrowing money on the bond market to pay their salaries and make up for the drop in local tax revenue. Puerto Rico’s territorial status meant it could not legally declare bankruptcy, and lenders assumed the island enjoyed the full backing of the US Treasury. Before long, it was known on Wall Street as the “belle of the bond markets.” By the mid-2010s, however, the bond debt had grown to $74 billion, and a $49 billion chasm had opened between the amount the government needed to pay public pensions and the money it had available. It began shedding more and more of its payroll. 

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), the government-­owned utility, had racked up $9 billion in debt. Unlike US states, which can buy electricity from neighboring grids and benefit from interstate gas pipelines, Puerto Rico needed to import fuel to run its power plants. The majority of that power came from burning oil, since petroleum was easier to store for long periods of time. But oil, and diesel in particular, was expensive and pushed the utility further and further into the red.

By 2016, Puerto Rico could no longer afford to pay its bills. Since the law that gave the US jurisdiction over nonstate territories made Puerto Rico a “possession” of Congress, it fell on the federal legislature—in which the island’s elected delegate had no vote—to decide what to do. Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act—shortened to PROMESA, or “promise” in Spanish. It established a fiscal control board appointed by the White House, with veto power over all spending by the island’s elected government. The board had authority over how the money the territorial government collected in taxes and utility bills could be used. It was a significant shift in the island’s autonomy. 

“The United States cannot continue its state of denial by failing to accept that its relationship with its citizens who reside in Puerto Rico is an egregious violation of their civil rights,” Juan R. Torruella, the late federal appeals court judge, wrote in a landmark paper in the Harvard Law Review in 2018, excoriating the legislation as yet another “colonial experiment.” “The democratic deficits inherent in this relationship cast doubt on its legitimacy, and require that it be frontally attacked and corrected ‘with all deliberate speed.’” 

Hurricane Maria struck a little over a year after PROMESA passed, and according to official figures, killed dozens. That proved to be just the start, however. As months ground on without any electricity and more people were forced to go without medicine or clean water, the death toll rose to the thousands. It would be 11 months before the grid would be fully restored, and even then, outages and appliance-­destroying electrical surges were distressingly common.

The spotty service wasn’t the only defining characteristic of the new era after Puerto Rico’s great blackout. The fiscal control board—which critics pejoratively referred to as “la junta,” using a term typically reserved for Latin America’s most notorious military dictatorships—saw privatization as the best path to solvency for the troubled state utility.

In 2020, the board approved a deal for Luma Energy—a joint venture between Quanta Services, a Texas-based energy infrastructure company, and its Canadian rival ATCO—to take over the distribution and sale of electricity in Puerto Rico. The contract was awarded through a process that clean-energy and anticorruption advocates said lacked transparency and delivered an agreement with few penalties for poor service. It was almost immediately mired in controversy.

A deadly diagnosis

Until that point, life was looking up for Suárez Vázquez. Her family had emerged from the aftermath of Maria without any loss of life. In 2019, her children were out of the house, and her youngest son, Edgardo, was studying at an aviation school in Ceiba, roughly two hours northeast of Guayama. He excelled. During regular health checks at the school, Edgardo was deemed fit. Gift bags started showing up at the house from American Airlines and JetBlue.

“They were courting him,” Suárez Vázquez says. “He was going to graduate with a great job.”

That summer of 2019, however, Edgardo began complaining of abdominal pain. He ignored it for a few months but promised his mother he would go to the doctor to get it checked out. On September 23, she got a call from her godson, a radiologist at the hospital. Not wanting to burden his anxious mother, Edgardo had gone to the hospital alone at 3 a.m., and tests had revealed three tumors entwined in his intestines.

So began a two-year battle with a form of cancer so rare that doctors said Edgardo’s case was one of only a few hundred worldwide. He gave up on flight school and took a job at the pharmaceutical factory with his parents. Coworkers raised money to help the family afford flights and stays to see specialists in other parts of Puerto Rico and then in Florida. Edgardo suspected the cause was something in the water. Doctors gave him inconclusive answers; they just wanted to study him to understand the unusual tumors. He got water-testing kits and discovered that the taps in their home were laden with high amounts of heavy metals typically found in coal ash. 

Ewing’s sarcoma tumors occur at a rate of about one in one million cancer diagnoses in the US each year. What Edgardo had—extraskeletal Ewing’s sarcoma, in which tumors form in soft tissue rather than bone—is even rarer. 

As a result, there’s scant research on what causes that kind of cancer. While the National Institutes of Health have found “no well-established association between Ewing sarcoma and environmental risk factors,” researchers cautioned in a 2024 paper that findings have been limited to “small, retrospective, case-control studies.”

Dependable sun

The push to give control over the territory’s power system to private companies with fossil-fuel interests ignored the reality that for many Puerto Ricans, rooftop solar panels and batteries were among the most dependable options for generating power after the hurricane. Solar power was relatively affordable, especially as Luma jacked up what were already some of the highest electricity rates in the US. It also didn’t lead to sudden surges that fried refrigerators and microwaves. Its output was as predictable as Caribbean sunshine.

But rooftop panels could generate only so much electricity for the island’s residents. Last year, when the Biden administration’s Department of Energy conducted its PR100 study into how Puerto Rico could meet its legally mandated goals of 100% renewable power by the middle of the century, the research showed that the bulk of the work would need to be done by big, utility-scale solar farms. 

GDA VIA AP IMAGES

With its flat lands once used to grow sugarcane, the southeastern part of Puerto Rico proved perfect for devoting acres to solar production. Several enormous solar farms with enough panels to generate hundreds of megawatts of electricity were planned for the area, including one owned by AES. But early efforts to get the projects off the ground stumbled once the fiscal oversight board got involved. The solar farms that Puerto Rico’s energy regulators approved ultimately faced rejection by federal overseers who complained that the panels in areas near Guayama could be built even more cheaply.

In a September 2023 letter to PREPA vetoing the projects, the oversight board’s lawyer chastised the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, a government regulatory body whose five commissioners are appointed by the governor, for allowing the solar developers to update contracts to account for surging costs from inflation that year. It was said to have created “a precedent that bids will be renegotiated, distorting market pricing and creating litigation risk.” In another letter to PREPA, in January 2024, the board agreed to allow projects generating up to 150 megawatts of power to move forward, acknowledging “the importance of developing renewable energy projects.”

“There’s no trust. That creates risk. Risk means more money. Things get more expensive. It’s disappointing, but that’s why we weren’t able to build large things.”

But that was hardly enough power to provide what the island needed, and critics said the agreement was guilty of the very thing the board accused Puerto Rican regulators of doing: discrediting the permitting process in the eyes of investors.

The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau “negotiated down to the bone to very inexpensive prices” on a handful of projects, says Javier Rúa-Jovet, the chief policy officer at the Solar & Energy Storage Association of Puerto Rico. “Then the fiscal board—in my opinion arbitrarily—canceled 450 megawatts of projects, saying they were expensive. That action by the fiscal board was a major factor in predetermining the failure of all future large-scale procurements,” he says.

When the independence of the Puerto Rican regulator responsible for issuing and judging the requests for proposals is overruled, project developers no longer believe that anything coming from the government’s local experts will be final. “There’s no trust,” says Rúa-Jovet. “That creates risk. Risk means more money. Things get more expensive. It’s disappointing, but that’s why we weren’t able to build large things.”

That isn’t to say the board alone bears all responsibility. An investigation released in January by the Energy Bureau blamed PREPA and Luma for causing “deep structural inefficiencies” that “ultimately delayed progress” toward Puerto Rico’s renewables goals.

The finding only further reinforced the idea that the most trustworthy path to steady power would be one Puerto Ricans built themselves. At the residential scale, Rúa-Jovet says, solar and batteries continue to be popular. Nearly 160,000 households—roughly 13% of the population—have solar panels, and 135,000 of them also have batteries. Of those, just 8,500 households are enrolled in the pilot virtual power plant, a collection of small-scale energy resources that have aggregated together and coordinated with grid operations. During blackouts, he says, Luma can tap into the network of panels and batteries to back up the grid. The total generation capacity on a sunny day is nearly 600 megawatts—eclipsing the 500 megawatts that the coal plant generates. But the project is just at the pilot stage. 

The share of renewables on Puerto Rico’s power grid hit 7% last year, up one percentage point from 2023. That increase was driven primarily by rooftop solar. Despite the growth and dependability of solar, in December Puerto Rican regulators approved New Fortress’s request to build an even bigger gas power station in San Juan, which is currently scheduled to come online in 2028.

“There’s been a strong grassroots push for a decentralized grid,” says Cathy Kunkel, a consultant who researches Puerto Rico for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and lived in San Juan until recently. She’d be more interested, she adds, if the proposals focused on “smaller-­scale natural-gas plants” that could be used to back up renewables, but “what they’re talking about doing instead are these giant gas plants in the San Juan metro area.” She says, “That’s just not going to provide the kind of household level of resilience that people are demanding.”

What’s more, New Fortress has taken a somewhat unusual approach to storing its natural gas. The company has built a makeshift import terminal next to a power plant in a corner of San Juan Bay by semipermanently mooring an LNG tanker, a vessel specifically designed for transport. Since Puerto Rico has no connections to an interstate pipeline network, New Fortress argued that the project didn’t require federal permits under the law that governs most natural-gas facilities in the US. As a result, the import terminal did not get federal approval for a safety plan in case of an accident like the ones that recently rocked Texas and Louisiana.

Skipping the permitting process also meant skirting public hearings, spurring outrage from Catholic clergy such as Lissette Avilés-Ríos, an activist nun who lives in the neighborhood next to the import terminal and who led protests to halt gas shipments. “Imagine what a hurricane like Maria could do to a natural-gas station like that,” she told me last summer, standing on the shoreline in front of her parish and peering out on San Juan Bay. “The pollution impact alone would be horrible.”

The shipments ultimately did stop for a few months—but not because of any regulatory enforcement. In fact, it was in violation of its contract that New Fortress abruptly cut off shipments when the price of natural gas skyrocketed globally in late 2021. When other buyers overseas said they’d pay higher prices for LNG than the contract in Puerto Rico guaranteed, New Fortress announced with little notice that it would cease deliveries for six months while upgrading its terminal.

“The government justifies extending coal plants because they say it’s the cheapest form of energy.”

Aldwin José Colón, 51, who lives across the street from Suárez Vázquez

The missed shipments exemplified the challenges in enforcing Puerto Rico’s contracts with the private companies that control its energy system and highlighted what Gretchen Sierra-Zorita, former president Joe Biden’s senior advisor on Puerto Rico and the territories, called the “troubling” fact that the same company operating the power plants is selling itself the fuel on which they run—disincentivizing any transition to alternatives.

“Territories want to diversify their energy sources and maximize the use of abundant solar energy,” she told me. “The Trump administration’s emphasis on domestic production of fossil fuels and defunding climate and clean-­energy initiatives will not provide the territories with affordable energy options they need to grow their economies, increase their self-sufficiency, and take care of their people.”

Puerto Rico’s other energy prospects are limited. The Energy Department study determined that offshore wind would be too expensive. Nuclear is also unlikely; the small modular reactors that would be the most realistic way to deliver nuclear energy here are still years away from commercialization and would likely cost too much for PREPA to purchase. Moreover, nuclear power would almost certainly face fierce opposition from residents in a disaster-prone place that has already seen how willing the federal government is to tolerate high casualty rates in a catastrophe. That leaves little option, the federal researchers concluded, beyond the type of utility-scale solar projects the fiscal oversight board has made impossible to build.

“Puerto Rico has been unsuccessful in building large-scale solar and large-scale batteries that could have substituted [for] the coal plant’s generation. Without that new, clean generation, you just can’t turn off the coal plant without causing a perennial blackout,” Rúa-Jovet says. “That’s just a physical fact.”

The lowest-cost energy, depending on who’s paying the price

The AES coal plant does produce some of the least expensive large-scale electricity currently available in Puerto Rico, says Cate Long, the founder of Puerto Rico Clearinghouse, a financial research service targeted at the island’s bondholders. “From a bondholder perspective, [it’s] the lowest cost,” she explains. “From the client and user perspective, it’s the lowest cost. It’s always been the cheapest form of energy down there.” 

The issue is that the price never factors in the cost to the health of people near the plant. 

“The government justifies extending coal plants because they say it’s the cheapest form of energy,” says Aldwin José Colón, 51, who lives across the street from Suárez Vázquez. He says he’s had cancer twice already.

On an island where nearly half the population relies on health-care programs paid for by frequently depleted Medicaid block grants, he says, “the government ends up paying the expense of people’s asthma and heart attacks, and the people just suffer.” 

On December 2, 2021, at 9:15 p.m., Edgardo died in the hospital. He was 25 years old. “So many people have died,” Suárez Vázquez told me, choking back tears. “They contaminated the water. The soil. The fish. The coast is black. My son’s insides were black. This never ends.” 

AP PHOTO/ALEJANDRO GRANADILLO

Nor do the blackouts. At 12:38 p.m. on April 16, as this story was being edited, all of Puerto Rico’s power plants went down in an island-wide outage triggered by a transmission line failure. As officials warned that the blackout would persist well into the next day, Casa Pueblo, a community group that advocates for rooftop solar, posted an invitation on X to charge phones and go online under its outdoor solar array near its headquarters in a town in the western part of Puerto Rico’s central mountain range.

“Come to the Solar Forest and the Energy Independence Plaza in Adjuntas,” the group beckoned, “where we have electricity and internet.” 

Alexander C. Kaufman is a reporter who has covered energy, climate change, pollution, business, and geopolitics for more than a decade.