Today, Puerto Rico faces its seventh electricity rate hike in twelve months under power privatization. “Natural disasters are not Puerto Rico’s biggest cause for concern. Rather, it is the decades of mismanagement of Puerto Rico’s power grid, and its government’s inability to comply with U.S. regulations to distribute relief funds — which the U.S. itself seriously delayed ...”
Most links & emphasis in quoted text were added for reference & clarity.
<big><big>The largest renewable peaker plant in the world has already been built in Puerto Rico, simply waiting to be tapped</big> says Javier Rúa-Jovet, chief policy officer of the</big>Solar & Energy Storage Association of Puerto Rico.
It’s no coincidence that this year’s gathering of the Southeastern Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, or SEARUC, was held in San Juan. All eyes are on Puerto Rico’s fascinating story of innovation in resilient energy, spurred principally by thousands of solar batteries deployed since the devastating hurricanes of 2017.
We’re now ... sitting on a massive virtual power plant, or VPP, an existing and growing network of solar powered storage units that can [operate] in unison to share power when most needed, like at peak power demand hours. It’s a clean, island-wide, resilient power generator that could save thousands of lives and dollars while preventing blackouts small and large. And turning our VPP on as fast as possible is the policy mandated by the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau/ PREB, the local regulator. All that’s left to do is to “flip the switch.”
...[Since the 2017 hurricanes,] virtually all new investment in renewables (fundamentally distributed solar plus storage) has come not from government — but nonprofits, private donations, and most importantly, Puerto Ricans themselves, aided by new and beneficial private financing options [, so over] 55,000 rooftop-solar powered batteries are already on Puerto Rican homes, a fleet that grows by around 2,000 every month [, equipped with built-in wireless Internet capacity to be switched on to feed power to the grid]….
According to Rúa-Jovet, the grid doesn’t need to wait a moment further on the much-bruited, long delayed grid overhaul in order for this VPP to be benefitting the island’s people now.
<big>But they’re stuck with Puerto Rico’s power plants depending on petroleum to generate about 97% of electricity,</big> while existing hooked-in renewables generate only 3%….