Friday, February 28, 2025, 8:02AM |  38°
MENU
Advertisement
In this Dec. 21, 2017, file photo, Inocencia Rivera, the mother of Eduardo Gonzalez, a man who committed suicide three weeks after the passage of Hurricane Maria, receives the night in her balcony, surrounded by small, solar-powered Christmas lights and a Puerto Rico flag, in Morovis, Puerto Rico.
3
MORE

Hurricanes blew away Puerto Rico’s power grid. Now solar power is rising to fill the void.

AP Photo/Carlos Giusti

Hurricanes blew away Puerto Rico’s power grid. Now solar power is rising to fill the void.

More than three months after Hurricanes Maria and Irma slammed their island, over a million Puerto Ricans are still without reliable power. But one recent day, Rosa López and José Quiñones finally left those ranks.

It happened when four technicians installed a Tesla Powerwall solar battery pack onto a wall in their suburban San Juan home — a 275-pound white metal beast that can store enough electricity to keep a house running from sunset to sunrise.

López and Quiñones are both engineers and were early green energy adopters. They already had solar panels on their roof before the storms, but the panels only worked properly if they were connected to the power grid. And with the grid knocked out, they had to rely on a backup generator.

Advertisement

That’s why they bought the Tesla battery system.

“I was looking to see how can I use the full power of the panels,” Quiñones says, “and the only way is installing batteries.”

The Tesla system means they’ll no longer be reliant on the grid, which was unreliable even before Irma and Maria. The new system was expensive — close to $10,000 — but so was fuel for their generator, at $400 a week. López says when Maria came “we started calculating, and we understand that we need to make this investment.”

López and Quiñones bought their battery system from a company called New Energy. Before the storms, the company sold maybe five batteries a month. But CEO Alex Uriarte says he sold 200 in October, and he’s hired about three dozen technicians to install them.

Advertisement

“Before Maria, nobody wanted to buy storage because it was too expensive,” Uriarte says. “And now everybody wants to buy storage. It’s not an issue now of saving money, it’s just an issue of having electricity.”

Uriarte says he’s lined up investors for a new solar microgrid with battery storage for a community of 3,000 homes. It would run independently, so if the main grid went down, the microgrid would stay up.

“We’re trying to be the first one to do a big microgrid here. We will become like a small utility,” Uriarte explains.

Investors from outside Puerto Rico have similar ideas.

After Hurricane Maria, German solar battery company Sonnen donated eight batteries for solar energy to community kitchens and health clinics. Now Sonnen hopes to work with Puerto Rico’s government to convert an old US naval base into a solar-powered housing development.

Richetta says Sonnen has sold more than 200 batteries in Puerto Rico since the storm, a number that he says is “really big business for us” in an industry that he admits is still tiny.

That’s why backers of solar are excited about what’s happening in Puerto Rico. It’s a laboratory, and potentially a very big one. Last month the governor of New York joined with Puerto Rico’s governor to announce a plan to transform the island’s energy system and integrate solar power and storage in remote areas.

It’s a longshot plan that would require billions of dollars in federal funding that may never materialize, but boosters of solar are hopeful nonetheless.

Among them is San Juan’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, who dreams of transforming the city’s electric supply and thinks solar has real promise as part of that effort. With roughly 40 percent of San Juan still without power, solar is already helping fill the breach. Along with private homes, Tesla has donated solar panels to run a hospital and a solar industry group working with the Clinton Foundation that will power the city’s main market.

And Cruz says she’d love to hear about Blake Richetta’s plans to bring Sonnen microgrids to Puerto Rico.

“They’re welcome in San Juan,” she says. “Tell him to call me.”

Cruz says outside investors would need to work alongside Puerto Ricans, and she says the island’s debt has to be erased so that local governments can invest in these new systems.

But bottom line, she says “this could be a wonderful showcase for solar energy for the rest of the world.”

Mayor Cruz says the Puerto Rico that she knew before Hurricane Maria will never be back, and that in many ways, that’s a good thing.

First Published: January 5, 2018, 8:45 a.m.

RELATED
Comments Disabled For This Story
Partners
Advertisement
Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic takes a timeout during the first period of an NHL hockey game against the Washington Capitals in Pittsburgh, Saturday, Feb. 22, 2025.
1
sports
Penguins rally after Alex Nedeljkovic’s outburst, beat the Flyers in overtime
Pittsburgh Steelers coach Arthur Smith walks off the field after losing to the Baltimore Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2025, in Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore Ravens won 28-14.
2
sports
Joe Starkey: Was Steelers GM Omar Khan kidding with his Arthur Smith comments?
Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, left, and general manager Omar Khan stand on the field before an NFL football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Giants, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024, in Pittsburgh.
3
sports
2025 NFL salary cap will rise to $279 million. Here's what that means for the Steelers
An example of a Real ID-compliant non-commercial driver's license in Pennsylvania.
4
news
The Real ID deadline is approaching. Here's what Pennsylvanians should know.
Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Bubba Chandler delivers in the third inning of a spring training baseball game against the Minnesota Twins in Fort Myers, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025.
5
sports
3 takeaways from Pirates’ lopsided spring training victory over Twins
In this Dec. 21, 2017, file photo, Inocencia Rivera, the mother of Eduardo Gonzalez, a man who committed suicide three weeks after the passage of Hurricane Maria, receives the night in her balcony, surrounded by small, solar-powered Christmas lights and a Puerto Rico flag, in Morovis, Puerto Rico.  (AP Photo/Carlos Giusti)
In this file photo, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz distributes solar lamps in San Juan’s La Perla neighborhood.  (Photo by Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo for The Washington Post)
An off-the-grid villa in Culebra, Puerto Rico. Roof-mounted solar panels provide electricity, and water tanks store rainwater.  (FTWP)
AP Photo/Carlos Giusti
Advertisement
LATEST business
Advertisement
TOP
Email a Story