NSIKAN AKPAN: When Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Rico's Electric Power Authority
had been relying on imported fossil fuels for 98 percent of its energy.
Its major plants beam power from the south
to the heavily populated north and west.
The storm flooded these power stations,
ripped out 65 percent of aboveground cables
and crippled the power supply.
Many are wondering if this commonwealth would be better off
being powered by solar.
But solar is not an easy fix.
Here are four things that Puerto Rico would need to make solar work.
Ingredient 1: Solar batteries...
Solar panels can withstand hurricanes
even Maria's 155 mile per hour winds failed to knock out
solar power at the Veterans Medical Center in San Juan.
But cloudy weather and the darkness of night
keeps solar panels from constantly generating
power.
The energy collected during clear days
must be stored.
ADAM GENTNER: So batteries have made an enormous
leap forward in recent years
as with the addition of lithium ion batteries.
Adam Gentner works for sonnen,
a world leader in solar battery storage.
After Maria, the German company provided
free solar batteries and panels
at 15 key sites in Puerto Rico.
This includes schools,
food shelters
and this public laundromat in Old San Juan
They picked this site because after Maria,
wastewater wasn't being treated and washing clothes became lethal.
ADAM GENTNER: We used lithium iron phosphate,
which is...as you can see it's not a small system for a home,
but it's much more resilient to environmental factors.
It can discharge and charge up to 10,000 times.
By packing less energy per square inch,
lithium iron phosphate batteries last longer
and are less likely to overheat in Puerto Rico's hot humid climate.
Gentner expects this $40,000, six kilowatt-hour battery system
at this laundromat to last 26 years
But Puerto Rico's solar emergence will need more than
just batteries.
Ingredient 2: Microgrids
Maria crushed 911 emergency communications on the island,
so the Las Vegas Fire Department partnered
with the nonprofit Empowered by Light
and the solar energy company Sunrun
to turn these fire stations into solar stations.
CAPT. RICHARD BIRT: This is 6,600 watts on the roof,
they support an 800 amp-hour,
25 kilowatt-hour battery system.
So it's enough for them to power the radios, the critical parts
of this station, 24 hours a day,
365 days a year.
NSIKAN AKPAN: This firehouse in Naguabo is now a microgrid,
a self-contained island of power production.
With this microgrid, the city's 30,000 residents
can access emergency services even during blackouts.
But a microgrid can do more than support a phone line,
according to Sunrun's Andy Newbold.
ANDY NEWBOLD: A lot of times you're not using all that energy at night,
so the excess energy can then feed back into the grid.
NSIKAN AKPAN: This excess energy can be siphoned into a virtual power plant
-- a power plant organized in the digital cloud
ANDY NEWBOLD: We're working on aggregating all these systems together,
so its hundreds of homes with solar and batteries
and that way when PREPA
or any utility across the country needs it,
they can call on us
NSIKAN AKPAN: When grouped together, these microgrids can power
a whole community or whole cities.
In Germany, one community of 10,000 residential microgrids
produces as much energy as all the coal plants in Texas and West Virginia.
But building this type of virtual community requires complex software.
Ingredient 3: A digital OASIS...
MANUEL RODRIGUEZ MARTINEZ: OASIS is a project that we're running from the
University [of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez] with the goal of designing
a new type of smart grid that is decentralized.
NSIKAN AKPAN: A smart grid is a self-thinking network of microgrids.
It can autonomously communicate where energy
is being produced
and where to send it.
Manuel Rodriguez Martinez and a team
of computer scientists, electrical engineers
and social scientists have spent
three years designing a smart grid
just for Puerto Rico.
MANUEL RODRIGUEZ MARTINEZ: So rather than just building something
and then hoping that people will buy it,
the project is trying to
understand from a design point of view
what people want...
and how can I incorporate that feedback into the system.
NSIKAN AKPAN: They engineered machine-learning algorithms
that monitor weather reports to predict how solar panels will perform
and ones that identify power surges before they happen.
Next, they designed a smart card that connects to home power meters,
so microgrids can chat with each other.
All this tech then combines with a marketplace app.
MANUEL RODRIGUEZ MARTINEZ: Something like eBay, where you can see all
the offers available for energy and the time when it is available,
and then you can decide from who to buy it
NSIKAN AKPAN: But none of this would work without...
Ingredient 4: Government buy-in.
NSIKAN AKPAN: Puerto Rico's governor announced he wants to privatize
and break up the energy utility
with a goal of more than 30 percent renewable energy
But because of the 30-year-old Stafford Act,
a law that doles out federal assistance for natural disasters,
Puerto Rico's energy system must be
rebuilt exactly how it was...
same poles, fossil fuel generators
and wiring as before.
So it's unclear at the moment how solar will integrate into the grid
ANDY NEWBOLD: Let's not build poles and wires just
to have them knocked down again in the next hurricane.
Let's think about smart
and resilient energy going forward.
We can't keep doing things the same way.
For the PBS NewsHour,
I'm Nsikan Akpan reporting for ScienceScope in Puerto Rico.