With Puerto Rico’s power grid completely knocked off by hurricane Maria, people have been wondering whether PR should rethink whether to restore it’s aging, expensive, fossil-fuel-powered power grid or replace it entirely with a modern system optimized for an island like Puerto Rico.
Scott Stapf posed that question in a tweet, to which Elon Musk responded with an offer to solve Puerto Rico's energy crisis using solar energy -
Which got the attention of Governor Ricardo Rossello -
The ball has been set rolling; stay tuned for further updates.
Updates …
Here are some updated exchanges that occurred today -
In other news ...
- Tesla is sending to Puerto Rico hundreds of its Powerwall battery systems that can be paired with solar panels. www.bloomberg.com/…
- Musk is said to have donated $250,000 to relief efforts. www.geekwire.com/…
- Sonnen GmbH, a German provider of energy-storage systems, is planning to install microgrids to provide electricity for at least 15 emergency relief centers in Puerto Rico. www.bloomberg.com/...
The State of Puerto Rico’s Electrical Grid
According to earther.com/…, Puerto Rico’s electrical grid was a mess even before the storm. The island’s electrical utility, PREPA has been in financial trouble, trying to operate and maintain an aging, expensive system on a relatively poor island.
For an island bathed in sunlight and buffeted by tropical winds, Puerto Rico extracts a ridiculously low amount of power from renewable sources and its inhabitants pay extremely high prices for energy derived from expensive oil. From www.eia.gov/… -
- In 2016, 47% of Puerto Rico’s electricity came from petroleum, 34% from natural gas, 17% from coal, and 2% from renewable energy.
- Two wind farms supplied nearly half of Puerto Rico's renewable generation in 2016; one of them, the 95-megawatt Santa Isabel facility, is the largest wind farm in the Caribbean.
- As of June 2017, Puerto Rico had 127 megawatts of utility-scale solar photovoltaic generating capacity and 88 megawatts of distributed (customer-sited, small-scale) capacity.
- Electricity fuel surcharges have decreased with world crude oil prices, but, in mid-2017, Puerto Rico's retail consumers still paid more for their power than consumers in any state except Hawaii.
It makes a lot of sense for PR to reject this old expensive system, shed the yoke of imported fossil fuel and upgrade itself to the 21st century.
Other Similar Projects
Tesla, along with its subsidiary SolarCity, has successfully built a few solar powered plants on small islands, and weaned them off fossil fuels.
In 2016, Tesla and its subsidiary SolarCity completed the installation of new solar-powered 1.4 MW plant and microgrid on the island of Ta’u in American Samoa, which shifted the entire island’s energy generation from 100 percent (expensive) diesel fuel to 100 percent solar. The $8 million project was funded by the U.S. Department of Interior and the American Samoa Power Authority (ASPA). The energy is stored in 60 Tesla Powerpacks — large batteries that allow Ta'u to stay powered for up to three days without any sunlight. The system was built with the capability of withstanding Category 5 hurricane winds. See news.nationalgeographic.com/… for some more details.
A big part of solar energy technology is energy storage, to provide electricity during night time and rainy days. That is where Tesla’s powerpacks and battery technology come in.
A similar plant is being built in Hawaiian island of Kauai, but this one is aimed at providing electricity during evening hours. Tesla’s 13 MW solar farm will store solar energy produced during the day using a 52 MWh Tesla Powerpack and deliver it to the grid during the evening hours to reduce the amount of fossil fuels needed to meet energy demand.
The plant is expected to save the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) 1.6 million gallons of diesel fuel annually, which is currently used to generate electricity during night. Tesla says the power packs will cut KIUC costs per kilowatt hour from 15.5 cents down to 13.9 cents.
What About Hurricanes?
Solar power plants can be and have been built to withstand Cat-5 hurricanes.
In Puerto Rico itself, the San Fermin solar project was built to withstand Category 5 winds. According to its builder TSK, the 27 MW solar power plant was built on land prone to flooding, in addition to being in a hurricane zone. All the components of this photovoltaic field had to be raised to a minimum height of 2m, including inverters, transformers and medium voltage cells. The plate and structure as a whole can withstand winds of up to 250 kmh.
According to earther.com/…, aerial imagery shows the plant appears to have weathered the storm.
Hooking up these systems to microgrids, small-scale networks that aren’t part of the main power grid, would further improve the resilience of these systems. Scientists and energy experts say that a distributed grid that doesn't rely on a single power plant for energy generation could help vulnerable island regions such as the Caribbean weather strong storms like Irma or Maria.
P.S. The solar arrays shown in the Earther tweet above did not fare well in the storm. Making solar farms hurricane-proof requires special attention and additional cost.
How About Wind Power?
Wind power could easily complement solar in a cost effective way. However, the technology for wind turbines that can withstand category 5 hurricanes is still immature. A recent study concluded that existing Class I turbine designs cannot successfully resist gusts and mean wind speeds near the eyewall of a category 5 hurricane. Note that turbines used in Europe do not have to face hurricane winds.
The good news is that wind turbines in Texas managed to survive Hurricane Harvey’s Cat-4 winds, having followed proper shutdown procedures — www.evwind.es/…
Here is a video of the 101 MW Santa Isabel wind farm in PR — there are reports that it suffered some damage due to hurricane Maria -
Several organizations are conducting research into innovative designs of wind turbines that can withstand Cat-5 hurricane winds.
There is even a design for a wind turbine that operates in typhoons and harnesses their energy for future use — www.sciencealert.com/…
A study by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, suggests that large arrays of offshore wind farms could actually reduce the intensity of hurricanes before they hit land. Using computer simulations that 78,000 large wind turbines spread across 35,000 square kilometers of ocean outside of New Orleans would have cut Hurricane Katrina’s category 3 winds at landfall by 129 to 158 kilometers per hour and reduced the storm surge by 79 percent. This is still in the realm of science fiction, but ideas can evolve into practical solutions as technology advances. www.scientificamerican.com/...
Challenges
Of course, there are major challenges ahead to reach this goal.
- How much will the new system cost? What is the ROI? How does it compare with simply repairing and continuing with the existing system?
- Where will funds and financing come from?
- How to make the power plants and the distribution system more resilient to future storms?
- What other renewable energy technologies make sense to add to the grid and to home energy systems (hydro, ocean wave/tidal, bio-fuels, bio-mass, ...)?
- Will the current crop of politicians and WH inhabitants (backed by fossil fuel industry troglodytes) facilitate this or stand in the way?
But at least people are asking the right questions and the renewable energy industry is stepping up to the challenge.
Note that Tesla and Elon Musk are the most prominent names in the solar and battery space, but that are plenty of other large and small companies in this industry.
The long-term economic benefits of switching to solar, wind and other renewable sources and reduced energy costs could be quite transformative for PR. In the short term, it will provide employment and capital infusion with new construction and installations.
The world is moving towards green energy, whether Republicans like it or not. E.g., see new diary today — “Almost two thirds of new power capacity in the world was clean energy far exceeding expectations” at www.dailykos.com/… and many other diaries on the subject here at DK.
Please read the poll question below as “Is a new electrical grid powered by solar, wind and other renewable energy sources right for Puerto Rico?”