Puerto Rico

“So I went to Puerto Rico in May, and only a few weeks before then, the entire island experienced a three-day Blackout after there was a fire and some electrical equipment in the south of the island, and beyond just the blackouts, another sort of more persisten…”

“The blackout in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria was the longest in U.S. History.”

“What you're seeing is that individuals, communities, nonprofit organizations are the ones that are really driving this effort toward a renewable, resilient power system, and not so much the government or the utilities.”

“The government had amassed over seventy billion dollars in debt, historic levels, and the utility itself was nine billion dollars in debt. In fact, they filed for bankruptcy in July, just months before the hurricanes hit.”

“In the fall of last year, there was some investigative reporting about what was happening to the grid under Luma, and one of the stats that grabbed me was that outage times have actually doubled under Luma. It's taking them longer to repair service than it did…”

“Sure, so actually a recent report just came out and found that there are over 42,000 rooftop solar systems have been installed across the island as of January, twenty-twenty-two, and so the number is by now probably thousands higher, and that's just for system…”

“Puerto Rico has that as well, but for whatever reason, for reasons that are unclear, PREPA did not initiate that process until months later.”

“It took two months to restore power to half the island's three million residents, and nearly one year to fully restore power.”

“The fossil fuel industry still have a total control of PREPA, but we have done like a projection by 20, 25, Puerto Rico should be producing by net metering by citizenship. Citizen investment up to one gigawatt of power, which will be more than necessary for re…”

“The Army Corps of Engineers, which led the reconstruction effort after Maria, estimated that 80% of the grid was damaged, destroyed, or otherwise compromised by the storm.”

“Billions of Federal recovery dollars have been made available and are flowing to the island specifically to fix the grid and to potentially invest in renewable energy, and very little of that money is actually, you know, being distributed on the ground, and so…”

“Yeah, exactly, and the word that I'm hearing from a Puerto Rican journalist that I'm in touch with or I'm following is survival, that this isn't resiliency, this isn't scrappy people making do with what they can, it's people being forced to survive, and there'…”

“In many other places, certainly in New York City where I'm based rooftop solar batteries is a nice-to-have. In Puerto Rico, it's a need-to-have. You need to refrigerate your insulin. You need to power your nebulizer. You need to stay connected and charge your …”

“So before Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, there were roughly 5000 rooftop solar systems on the island, and very few of them had battery backup systems. Today, the number is around 50, 55,000 solar systems, and the majority have batteries, and that's largely becau…”

“Nearly two weeks later, and one third of the island's residents still don't have access to power.”

“Many customers have seen their electricity bills double, so they're paying more for a crappier service, essentially.”

“Puerto Rico is still one of the largest power wall markets, which is kind of wild, because there's not a lot of people in Puerto Rico. But I think it might be the single largest power wall market still.”