The clockNew Fortress Energy stopped supplying natural gas to the San Juan and Palo Seco generating units on October 31, and the replacement fuel is being paid for one expensive day at a time: running those units on diesel has already added roughly $118 million in costs, at about $1.2 million per day.^[1][2][3] The Energy Bureau's formal default notice went out on October 24, which opened a ten-day window - closing next week - for NFE to cure the deficiencies or face contract termination by the Electric Power Authority.^[4] The immediate lever is in federal court, where AEE and NFE were ordered to appear on November 13 to say whether an alternate gas supplier can use the San Juan bay terminal's facilities to deliver the fuel NFE is not delivering.^[5] The chokepointHere is the structural problem that turns a contract dispute into a crisis: NFE holds the lease on the only facility on Puerto Rico's north coast where liquefied natural gas can be imported, and that lease runs until 2038.^[6] Every replacement supplier - Crowley, Naturgy and Javelin have all been in talks since November 3 - has to physically pass through infrastructure their competitor controls.^[7] The suppliers' answer, disclosed in House Transportation Committee testimony on November 12 and first reported by NotiCel and Ey Boricua, is a flat refusal: all three are willing to sell liquefied natural gas, but none will hand its cargo to NFE or sign a tolling agreement directly with NFE. They demand payment guarantees from the government and want AEE, through the Public-Private Partnerships Authority, to be the contracting party.^[8][9] Meanwhile NFE itself is behind on the lease - $355,761.14 unpaid to the Ports Authority as of November 1 - while regulators examine whether its conduct in the terminal and supply chain amounts to anti-competitive behavior warranting referral to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Puerto Rico's antitrust laws.^[10][11][12] The exit rampWhile lawyers argue over the terminal, a quieter filing points at what comes after. Innovation Force Solar Systems has prepared an unsolicited public-private partnership proposal for an 800-megawatt battery storage hub in Salinas, disclosed in an intervention filing in the Energy Bureau's gas-supply proceeding and first reported by Caribbean Business.^[13][14] At 800 megawatts it would exceed the capacity of every battery project now underway on the island, and it carries a Spanish development partner, EWattio, which manages more than 138 renewable projects in Spain and Portugal.^[15][16] The proposal's own framing is the tell: it invokes the 2009 Public-Private Partnerships Act "in the face of the crisis caused by the vulnerability of depending on imported fossil fuels." A storage hub does not replace gas as a fuel - but it is the piece of infrastructure that makes the grid less hostage to any single fuel supplier, because stored energy responds in fractions of a second when a generator trips and lets daytime solar cover the evening peak.^[13] The so-whatFor ratepayers, the near-term question is how much of the $118 million diesel premium the Energy Bureau eventually allows into the tariff - that decision has not been made.^[2] For the government's negotiators, the suppliers' refusal to touch NFE simplifies the architecture: any replacement supply deal is a government-to-supplier contract with NFE reduced to a landlord, which is also the fastest way to dilute the 2038 terminal lock. And for anyone building the island's energy future, the filing is a reminder that the most durable answer to fuel hostage-taking is not finding a second gas supplier - it is building capacity that does not depend on imported fuel at all. The proposal still needs viability review by the P3 Authority and its own regulatory gauntlet, and its cost and financing are undisclosed. But the sequence matters: the crisis exposed the dependency, and the alternative is already on the table rather than in a study.