As Puerto Rico experienced its worst blackout in months, leaving virtually all of the island’s 1.5 million customers without electricity for days, the town of Adjuntas was an oasis.
On a Thursday morning in early April, when the school was closed, children filled seats in an air-conditioned movie theater at a community center, a pizzeria prepared its kitchen for the lunchtime rush, and the local barbershop welcomed customers looking for a quick grooming.
The contrast shows why Adjuntas, a community of about 18,000 in the densely forested mountains of central Puerto Rico, has become a model of how solar power could tackle one of the island’s most vexing problems: an energy grid that struggled to to recover after Hurricane María practically wiped it out in 2017.
Thanks in large part to the work of Casa Pueblo, a conservation nonprofit, about 400 homes and businesses in Adjuntas have solar power, including more than a dozen stores connected to a small grid powered by the sun. Backup batteries even allow the systems to operate during a blackout, keeping businesses open and turning the organization’s headquarters into a haven for people using medical devices that need to be powered.
“Having energy security takes the burden off both the employees and the families who come to the business,” said Ángel Irizarry Feliciano, owner of Lucy’s Pizza, which continued to operate during the power outage. “It was a relief that we could continue to serve our people without interruptions or reduced hours.”
But the situation in Adjuntas also shows how far the rest of Puerto Rico has to go in terms of renewable energy, for all the seemingly obvious reasons: the island’s long and sunny days; the need to import all other fuels, which makes electricity generation costly; and, of course, the constantly failing power grid.
While the number of solar installations has risen in recent years, solar accounts for just 2.5 percent of Puerto Rico’s total energy production, government data shows. The rest comes from factories fueled by imported natural gas, coal and petroleum, with another bit of wind energy.
Many Puerto Ricans can’t afford to spend the $27,000 a typical solar power system could cost, and the government — which emerged from an unprecedented bankruptcy in March — didn’t begin setting concrete renewable energy targets until 2019. . solar panels on their homes were deterred by the chaotic state of Puerto Rico’s finances, in particular a proposal to impose a levy on solar customers to help support the public utility company.
The Casa Pueblo installations are paid for with money from foundations, both in Puerto Rico and abroad, and from the sale of coffee grown in Adjuntas. Since Hurricane María, the organization has expanded its solar adoption efforts to communities in other parts of the island.
“We need public policies to create a business model that focuses on helping you generate your own power, not just one that provides power,” said Arturo Massol Deyá, associate director of Casa Pueblo. “The people are tired of the constant power cuts and their appliances are being ruined.”
Power was not fully restored for four days after the most recent power outage, which began on April 6 after a fire at a power plant in the southwestern town of Guayanilla. The island-wide shutdown created a cascade of problems: water was also cut off to many, hospitals had to use emergency generators, and schools and businesses were closed.
The outage sparked protests and calls on the government to cancel its contract with Luma Energy, the private energy company that took over the grid last June, with promises to restore the grid. Puerto Rico’s governor, Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia, rejected the idea. But the constant power outages, along with monthly electricity bills that have risen 46 percent in the past year, have added to frustration with the utility, which is run by a Canadian-American company with a 15-year contract signed last year.
“While some politicians choose to ignore and blame the power grid that Luma inherited without facts, we will continue to focus on Puerto Rico’s energy future,” Luma said in a statement to The New York Times.
Puerto Rico has ambitions to do more with renewable energy. In 2019, the government passed a clean energy law that requires 100 percent of the island’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2050, and includes promises to use federal money to build renewable energy projects that help low-income communities. to achieve.
The council that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances approved 18 renewable energy projects in March with the goal of increasing clean energy production to 23 percent of the island’s total by the end of 2024. clean energy options. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have allocated $12 billion to revamp the island’s energy industry.
While it proposed such an ambitious renewable energy target, the oversight council raised the prospect of charging consumers who have solar panels on their homes by making them pay for the electricity they generate.
Under the proposal, which was made as a way to help pay $9 billion in debt from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, new solar customers would have had to pay for every kilowatt of solar energy they generated. Because the proposal also included a plan to increase tariffs for conventional power, it was scrapped by the governor in March. But solar proponents say they worry that as negotiations over a new agreement continue, the charge — which some are calling the solar tax — could be revived.
“We need to find a way to deal with the debt,” said Francisco Berrios Portela, director of the energy policy program at the Department of Economic Development and Trade in Puerto Rico. “But it can’t be by adding a tax to the generation produced by this type of system that we’re promoting.”
The uncertainty of whether they should pay more fees for a solar energy system in a home or business has discouraged consumers like María Lizardi Córdova, an accountant living in San Juan. Ms Lizardi Córdova can see a neighbor’s solar panels from her bedroom window and knows many other people in the area who have decided to invest in solar energy, but she thinks it’s too early to make the switch herself.
“This is not the right time, and it has to do with all the uncertainty about any additional costs for solar energy and what my costs would be,” said Ms Lizardi Córdova. “The situation gets more complicated with the debt.”
For Puerto Ricans with medical needs, such as refrigeration for insulin or power for dialysis machines, outages can be insidious — and the benefits of a solar-powered backup system are overwhelming.
In Adjuntas, Casa Pueblo runs a special project that provides solar panels to people with medical needs, such as Juan Molina Reyes, a farmer who grows plantains, coffee and oranges.
Molina Reyes’ 75-year-old father, Luis, suffered a stroke in August and needs help breathing. He says he searched seven gas generators to keep his father’s oxygen concentrator running when the power went out.
That changed in February, when Mr Molina Reyes’s family got solar panels after aid from the charity. He said he was lucky to have them.
“It was disturbing to know that if at any point the system failed me, my father would succeed,” said Mr Molina Reyes. “It was a tough fight.”
