Out of Puerto Rico’s crisis may come the power system of the future
If you had billions of dollars to rebuild an electric grid for 3.4 million people from scratch, how would you do it?
Puerto Rico has that opportunity after Hurricane Maria wiped out its antiquated electricity system, and solar power companies are lining up to help. Most of the attention has focused on Telsa CEO Elon Musk’s very public Twitter exchange with Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, but Houston-based Sunnova Energy already has almost 10,000 customers with solar panels on the island.
“Everybody can agree that we should not go back to the status quo,” Sunnova CEO John Berger said. “We need to have a better energy system, and the technology is here now. We need to adopt that technology and move forward.”
Almost a month after the hurricane, 84 percent of customers on the island remain without grid power, relying instead on generators. Sunnova is already the largest residential solar provider in Puerto Rico. It owns the equipment, installs it on rooftops and then sells the electricity to the customer. Sunnova maintains and repairs the equipment. The customer only pays for the power.
Until recently, though, the Puerto Rico’s public utility made it difficult for customers to generate their power without also relying on the electric grid.
“We’ve had trying times with the public utility there trying to get interconnected,” Berger told me. “We were looking toward installing batteries for our customers to provide them with the kind of reliability that would be really handy at this point in time. Unfortunately, Maria hit before we had time to get everything together.”
Sunnova is now scrambling to deploy equipment that will allow customers to generate power for the weeks and months that it will take to restore the grid. Sunnova’s batteries began arriving Monday, and Berger flew to San Juan on Wednesday.
“We have a field office there. We have hundreds of people who work for our dealers and install-
ers. We are way, way ahead of everybody,” Berger said. “This looks like it will be a seminal moment in the energy business, when people recognize that the change is here. Solar and batteries are not the future, it’s the present.”
Rosselló agrees, saying at a news conference that Puerto Rico has a oncein-a-generation chance to completely overhaul the electric grid.
“If there is a silver lining, we can start reconceptualizing how we want to produce energy here in Puerto Rico and distribute it and do it in a more reliable fashion,” Rosselló told reporters.
The U.S. territory has relied on oil-fired power plants in the past, and has only recently added a wind farm and small-scale solar fields. Pattern Energy’s wind facility survived the storm well but is useless without a functioning grid. Solar offers greater resiliency because it can be scattered around the island to minimize reliance on vulnerable transmission lines.
Tesla has successfully built large-scale solar projects with battery storage in American Samoa and Hawaii. Musk has famously promised a huge 100megawatt battery to improve reliability in South Australia within 100 days, or it’s free. Last week Musk said Tesla would delay rolling out a batterypowered semi-truck to focus on shipping batteries to Puerto Rico.
“The Tesla team has (built solar grids) for many smaller islands around the world, but there is no scalability limit, so it can be done for Puerto Rico too,” Musk said in a tweet.
German company Sonnen also announced two weeks ago it would begin shipping solar panels and batteries to Puerto Rico to build stand-alone microgrids for hospitals and other emergency facilities. The company began working with local renewable energy company Pura Energia last year to increase resiliency to storms.
Berger said he doesn’t fear competition from other renewable energy companies because the need is so great.
“I really do believe that if you do the right thing, it will come out well for you as a company,” Berger said. “This is not the time to rip people’s faces off and make a lot of money, this is a time to make sure people are taken care of as fast you can. We’re running a business, yeah, but there has to be a balance.”
Puerto Rico must also strike a balance in building its new electric system. Natural gas companies want the island to build liquefied natural gas facilities and buy combined-cycle turbines to replace the oil-burning power plants. But elected officials must choose the right percentage of big centralized power sources and smaller ones that can be distributed across the island. How much generation is really needed, if the public utility employs the latest tools to reduce demand during peak periods?
Puerto Rico has a chance to use the latest, most efficient technologies and become a model for what the rest of the world’s grids can become. Puerto Rico could cut demand for fossil fuels in half.
Houston’s Sunnova is trying to prove that solar and batteries can be an important and reliable source of power, and if it succeeds, the company could pave the way for Houston to retain the global energy capital crown.