For renewables advocates, Puerto Rico may act as a study on
how to build a clean grid from the ground up.
After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, taking down all
electricity and most communications with it, Cecilio Aponte was able to get in
contact with his family there relatively quickly. Through a brief phone call
and a few texts, his mom nailed down uncles, aunts and cousins in Aguadilla and
Moca on the western edge of the island.
But two weeks after the eye of the storm bore down on Puerto
Rico, though Aponte’s family was able to communicate their safety and one aunt
can get cell service if she stands on her still-intact roof, none had grid
power. They were relying on diesel generators and rapidly dwindling supplies of
fuel.
Now, three weeks since the storm, only about 17 percent of
Puerto Rico has electricity. The lack of power has severely exacerbated the
growing humanitarian crisis. Food sits rotting on shelves, the majority of
hospitals are relying on generators, and with 40 percent of the island still
without running water, the likelihood for disease has increased.
The lack of power disproportionately threatens the most
vulnerable -- such as those who rely on dialysis, those without the means to
buy generators, and those who live in remote areas -- but as the weeks stretch
into months without electricity, the impacts on all Puerto Ricans on the island
will be wide-ranging.
While the U.S. president has literally thrown paper towel rolls at the problem,
private citizens and industries have stepped in to coordinate efforts. The renewable energy
industry, for one, has seen aiding in the crisis as both a moral imperative and
an opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of its technology. Though some
in the renewables industry have cautioned against putting the cart before the
horse when so many lives are still in peril, many have also raised questions
about the future.
Several companies and experts have seized on the power
outages as a segue to discuss long-term resilience and the potential for
distributed energy to protect island grids. Aponte, a current fellow at the
Clean Energy Leadership Institute, said the destruction has compelled him to
consider a future rebuilding Puerto Rico’s grid.
“What got me into energy in the first place was energy
access and global equity. I realized that part of the U.S. -- and the place my
family’s from -- has those issues,” said Aponte. “Resiliency is great, yes. But
besides people just talking about it, how is it going to happen on the island
in a way that’s going to keep happening and not just be a fad after a hurricane?”
Destruction
When I catch up with Alejandro Uriarte, president of San
Juan-based solar company New Energy, he’s just returned from a meeting with
cell phone providers about how renewables might power cell towers now running
solely on diesel. When Uriarte describes the status of electrical distribution
on the island, he speaks of complete devastation. “Everything is gone,” he
said.
Renewables installations, though, fared a bit better.
Uriarte said all of his solar installations sustained some damages, affecting
maybe 10 to 15 percent of the panels. That’s a much better percentage than the
estimated 80 percent of transmission lines that were taken down. But Uriarte
notes that because nearly all existing renewables systems were connected to the
island’s now-destroyed grid, most are still unable to produce energy.
“Our work has certainly changed from selling
grid-interconnected solar equipment to selling storage for those systems that
were already installed, or selling solar-plus-storage to be off-grid until the
grid comes back,” said Uriarte. “Then we can talk about interconnecting them.”
Most renewable companies with a presence on the island are
in immediate repair mode. Although Puerto Rico, like all Caribbean islands,
relies heavily on
fossil fuels for power, the island did have 215 megawatts of solar before
the storm. Companies such as Sunnova, Tesla (New Energy is a certified Tesla
installer), and Sonnen have residential and small-scale projects. Sonnen said
all its systems fell offline after the hurricanes. It’s working on stabilizing
its existing fleet, and has started working with solar installer Pura Energía
to provide new microgrid systems for sale and some for free. Sunnova was also
working to repair parts of its 10,000 installed systems.
Many other companies and clean energy trade associations
have also pledged to divert supply to help in the short term. After a call
for coordinated efforts, the Solar Energy Industries Association received
160 responses with offers for help. The Distributed Wind Energy Association
(DWEA) is coordinating microgrid deliveries from three manufacturers with
funding from United Wind. And on Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke on the phone
with Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, about how the company’s solar
and battery technologies can contribute to immediate relief efforts, and
possibly remake the grid entirely.
"Emergency mode" and beyond
Clean energy manufacturers and resilience experts are asking
what can be done to harden the island’s grid even in the initial stages of
Puerto Rico's recovery.
“Typically, investments that are made right after a storm,
almost in emergency mode, you can see 10 years later those investments have
remained,” said Roy Torbert, principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute’s
Islands Energy program. “Ask these questions now, so the investments you make
for the long term are the right way to go.”
But what works in such extreme weather is not a given. The
strength of Maria was nearly unfathomable. It hit Puerto Rico as a category 4
storm with 155-mile-per-hour winds that reached 60 miles from its core and
tossed roofs, snapped pine power poles, and tangled the island’s aboveground
transmission wires. Gusts on the island reached 195 miles per hour.
With such strong storms, it’s not guaranteed that
distributed renewable energy infrastructure would hold up much better than
traditional electricity. According to Torbert, solar panels are generally
designed to stand up to a category 4 storm and their ability to withstand
strong storms depends on the quality of their foundation. In Puerto Rico,
Uriarte said, panels are required to withstand 145-mile-per-hour winds. Maria
was stronger than that when it made landfall on the island, and much stronger
when it blew through islands like Dominica with 175-mile-per-hour winds. Just
before Maria arrived, Hurricane Irma brought winds of 185 miles per hour to
some Caribbean islands.
Though renewable installations on islands like Puerto Rico
did sustain damage, renewable companies and advocates say distributed sources
that could function apart from the grid would be easier to repair and get back
on-line than centralized power and distribution. To brace for a storm, Torbert
said nacelles on wind turbines can be tilted down and the blades turned away
from the wind so they don’t over-spin.
Adding storage systems to solar and wind installations would
allow resources to start providing power even if distribution and transmission
remained down. Jennifer Jenkins, executive director at DWEA, explained that
manufacturers in the distributed wind space originally worked on off-grid
installations in remote areas. She said distributed wind systems make sense on
islands and, when combined with storage, could keep electricity available in
the absence of grid power.
Other, more basic infrastructural changes -- such as
replacing wood polls with concrete and installing transmission lines
underground -- could also prevent such widespread outages.
"An increasingly brittle transmission system"
Even before the storm, Puerto Rico’s electric grid was a
delicate system. Its utility and sole electricity provider, the Puerto Rico
Electric Power Authority (PREPA), has become notorious for its $9 billion
bankruptcy and poor management. The Puerto Rico Energy Commission (PREC)
enshrined its issues in a 2016
report, writing, “the severe outages, deferred maintenance, and a lack of
experienced staff have resulted in an increasingly brittle transmission
system.”
According to Torbert, the aftermath of the hurricane
“requires an immediate reckoning” with PREPA’s difficulties. Almost everyone
interviewed for this story expressed concerns with the functioning of the
island’s utility.
“The entire organization, PREPA, stem to stern, top to
bottom, is incapable of carrying out its mission,” said Tom Sanzillo, director
of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
“It’s largely a
function of upper management and the toxic effect it has on the morale and
competency of the workers.”
Uriarte, too, expressed frustrations, specifically about the
lack of commitment he sees from PREPA on transitioning to clean energy. “They
have never come out against renewables,” he said. “They always say they’re friendly
to renewables. But in practice, they are not.” To get approval for
interconnections to the grid and commercial renewable projects, Uriarte said,
the permitting process is maddeningly slow.
But placing the blame squarely on PREPA ignores Puerto Rican
and U.S. history. Buried lines, which are also more vulnerable to flooding, can
cost anywhere from four to 14 times more than those above ground. Renewables
prices have become increasingly cost-competitive with traditional fuels, but
distributed renewable energy still requires significant investment.
Puerto Rico doesn’t have an excess of cash. Over a century
of the United States holding Puerto Rico at arm's length has left Puerto Rico
with debt in the billions of dollars. As debt piled up, Puerto Rico and PREPA
continued to be second priorities for the mainland.
Over the years, PREPA has also had to cope with a shrinking
workforce as 30 percent of its workers retired or left for the mainland. The
2016 report from PREC notes much of PREPA’s work had become “triaging” in the
place of preventative maintenance. In 2016, President Obama signed the Puerto
Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. That act created a
board that this summer rejected a restructuring deal for PREPA's debt.
"That decision was encouraging in that it suggested
support in Washington for an actual path to recovery for the power
authority," Sanzillo wrote in an opinion for The Hill. Recently, the utility has
floated privatization to deal with its economic shortfall.
“We have the technology,” said Aponte. “But if we can’t fix
the money piece, then the technology means nothing. That’s scary.”
In the absence of strong management from PREPA, Uriarte said
the conversations about a modernized grid bubbling up among renewables
advocates are necessary. “Just imagine if there was an honest conversation
about this. The utility says, 'For us to take power to this community in the
middle of the mountain on the west side is going to take a year,'” he said.
“The solar could industry could say, 'Hey, we could put a microgrid there in
four months' and resolve the issue faster.”
For now, Gov. Rosselló has said modernizing the grid would
happen in tandem with repairing what’s left. But because of the dire situation
on the ground, designing and fashioning that new grid may fall to
entrepreneurs, like Musk, and companies with the means. José E. Sánchez, head
of the Army Corps of Engineers task force to restore power, told
the New York Times that the Federal Emergency Management Agency
is working on repairing and replacing, but not improving.
“This is a devastating situation,” said Jenkins of the DWEA.
“But it really does give us this very unique opportunity to rebuild a grid and
to do that with clean technology. We really need to do it right.”
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