![]() ![]() Funded through the Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund (PR-ERF), the funding and selected organizations will support DOE’s efforts to deploy solar and battery storage systems on up to 40,000 single-family households in Puerto Rico. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a slate of community groups and nonprofits selected to receive up to $13.85 million to help vulnerable households in Puerto Rico obtain residential solar and battery storage installations and provide residents with education and consumer protection services. “You’re in a situation with a clean slate.On November 29, 2023, the U.S. Of course, for most Puerto Ricans, the lights are still out. It’s not to be bold and experiment,” he said. “The working culture is to keep the lights on. The biggest challenge may be the culture within the utility, said Mark Grundy, managing director of communications for the Rocky Mountain Institute, which works with other Caribbean islands to transition their power systems to cleaner energy. “That’s not going to solve the problem, but it’s certainly going to start lighting up Puerto Rico much quicker.”Ĭongress could erect another obstacle, if any aid package encourages building a more traditional grid instead. “We can start dividing Puerto Rico into different regions … and then start developing microgrids,” he told TIME. Last week, TIME quoted Rossello saying he was interested in rebuilding differently. Years of paying high prices for the imported fuel helped drive PREPA to declare bankruptcy in July. Oil is one of the most expensive fuels for generating electricity. Still, Sanzillo said he’s holding out hope that the storm may have weakened some of that opposition. “They are opposed to solar energy,” he said. Sanzillo said the territory’s government and its utility, called PREPA, have resisted efforts to boost their use of renewable energy. Nearly half of the island’s power was generated with imported oil last year, and almost all of the rest came from gas and coal. But there are plenty of obstacles that could thwart the effort, said Tom Sanzillo, director of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, which has been working with a group of businesses in Puerto Rico to push for more renewable energy. The tweets made what was a long-shot hope for renewable energy advocates in Puerto Rico suddenly seem within reach. Hurricane Maria damaged an already trouble power grid in Puerto Rico. In Brooklyn, New York, for example, dozens of homeowners have signed on to a project that is trying to build a microgrid there that would allowing them to operate independent of the grid, if needed. ![]() His firm works with Tesla, but Navin said they have not been involved in anything regarding Puerto Rico.Īs Navin said, microgrids can work in tandem with a traditional grid. “In some of these remote areas or rural areas, rather than building hundreds of miles of power lines, it would be cheaper to build microgrids,” he said. Jeff Navin, who was acting chief of staff in the Energy Department in the Obama administration before he co-founded Boundary Stone Partners, a clean energy consulting firm, said it would be technically and economically feasible for Tesla to build its systems across parts of Puerto Rico, perhaps working them into a more traditional grid. Tesla has built such systems on Kauai in the state of Hawaii and on an island in American Samoa. New York has been promoting microgrids in the state for these reasons. Once in place, they say, the system would be more flexible, cheaper to run, and better able to withstand future storms. They say that building a series of microgrids-which would tie together solar or wind generation and batteries-could be cheaper and faster than trying to rebuild a centralized system reliant on large, conventional power plants. The damage has prompted many renewable energy advocates to say the island’s grid-which was almost entirely reliant on fossil fuels-should be built back greener and more resilient. Authorities have said it could be months before power is restored to most of the island. As of Thursday, only 11 percent of customers had the lights back on. The island’s electricity grid was devastated by Hurricane Maria, which knocked out power entirely.
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