They are going to be managing, operating and just owning the entire system.īENTLEY: Leading that effort is Gustavo Irizarry, who runs a pizza shop on the square.īENTLEY: He says the microgrid is about energy security. We are going to reinvest that money into our own community. But we are going to charge ourselves for the power that we are consuming. But the project started with Casa Pueblo, a local community organization that has run exclusively on solar for years.ĪRELLANO: So after Hurricane Maria, Casa Pueblo became this example of what you could have if there was solar, if there was an alternative to the grid that, at the moment, was down for over 11 months here in Adjuntas.īENTLEY: Arellano says the businesses benefiting from the microgrid took that example to heart and now essentially run their own mini-utility.ĪRELLANO: The community was always like, OK, we have, now, this resiliency component. Yeah.īENTLEY: Cynthia Arellano is project manager for the Honnold Foundation, a nonprofit that helped Adjuntas build its microgrid. No, they're used to that, and they're very happy. And in this case, they don't mind a bunch of lizards running all over them.ĪRELLANO: No. Rain, shine - they're built for kind of these Puerto Rico hurricane conditions.īENTLEY: Yeah. They're built for fire suppressant, just kind of inside the system. These are the guts of the Adjuntas microgrid.ĬYNTHIA ARELLANO: And these guys are built for all conditions. Tucked behind a furniture store and a defunct gas station, there is a row of big, gray boxes, like industrial refrigerators. That is a microgrid - a self-reliant mini-utility run independently of the islandwide grid. Even as the sun sinks behind the mountains, 14 businesses and two apartment buildings along the central plaza are running on solar power, thanks to two banks of batteries and some computers that orchestrate the flow of electricity among them. Our colleagues at Here & Now sent reporter Chris Bentley to look into this recently, and here's the story.ĬHRIS BENTLEY, BYLINE: You can find what some people in Puerto Rico see as the future of the electric grid here in the mountains north of Ponce, where the Rio Cidra runs past the town square in Adjuntas. That explains why many on the island favor building a decentralized grid, one that is more stable and more resilient and powered mostly by the sun. And just six years ago, Hurricane Maria left large parts of Puerto Rico without power for months. Last year, Hurricane Fiona knocked out electricity for many across the island. Puerto Rico's electric power grid does not have a great track record when it comes to weathering powerful storms.
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