In the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo, prominent environmental activist Enrique De León has reignited public debate over the country’s controversial distributed electricity generation rules, reiterating his fierce opposition to a long-criticized policy that imposes a 25 percent levy on residential solar power fed back into the national grid. Opponents of the charge have widely dubbed it the unfair “sun tax”, a policy that has been a major point of friction between climate advocates and national energy regulators for months.
Speaking during a recent appearance on the current affairs radio program *Alternativa*, De León revealed that members of the RD 100% Renewable Coalition — a broad alliance of environmental groups, clean energy advocates, and community organizations pushing for a full transition to renewable power in the Dominican Republic — are deeply frustrated by the failure of the Superintendency of Electricity to follow through on its public pledges to revise the controversial regulation. He added that energy officials have cited growing uncertainty stemming from global geopolitical frictions, including the escalating tensions involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, as the official reason for delaying any planned adjustments to the policy.
The timeline of broken promises dates back to March of this year, when Superintendent of Electricity Andrés Astacio held formal talks with representatives from the RD 100% Renewable Coalition. During that meeting, De León confirmed, Astacio explicitly committed to eliminating the 25 percent surcharge on grid-injected residential solar power, alongside a suite of other regulatory provisions that clean energy advocates have repeatedly flagged as unnecessary barriers to the expansion of renewable energy across the country. Shockingly, the revised distributed generation regulation entered into force at the end of March without any of the promised changes being implemented, leaving advocates blindsided by the regulator’s last-minute reversal.
In a stark warning about the long-term consequences of retaining the levy, De León emphasized that keeping the “sun tax” on the books will almost certainly dissuade residential property owners and private investors from committing capital to new rooftop solar installations across the country. This slowdown in residential solar adoption, he argued, will create a major drag on the Dominican Republic’s broader push to scale up clean energy production, cut the nation’s costly and polluting dependence on imported fossil fuels, and meet the country’s legally binding and nationally stated energy transition and climate action targets. For the coalition, De León stressed, removing this and other regressive regulatory barriers remains a non-negotiable priority to advance meaningful climate action in the Dominican Republic.