Earthquake, Widespread Outages in Puerto Rico Test New Microgrids

(Photo: A school in Guanica, Puerto Rico, shown on January 7, 2020. Credit: @eddiemguerra on Twitter)

by | Jan 10, 2020

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Earthquake, Widespread Outages in Puerto Rico Test New Microgrids

(Photo: A school in Guanica, Puerto Rico, shown on January 7, 2020. Credit: @eddiemguerra on Twitter)

Most of Puerto Rico remains without electricity following a 6.4-magnitude earthquake that struck on Tuesday. Despite the fresh destruction for an island still reeling from Hurricane Maria, solar plus storage microgrids installed at 10 schools continued running.

The microgrids are a collaborative effort by Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), Save the Children, and Kinesis Foundation in response to Maria, Microgrid Knowledge’s Elisa Wood reported on Thursday. In September 2018, the primary school Ángel Rafael “Papo” Díaz Colón in central Puerto Rico became the first to receive one of the systems. After Maria, the school lost electricity and went five months without being able to offer a full day of learning for the children, according to RMI.

A new 15-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array and a 34 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery system went in for the school, followed by installations at an additional nine schools throughout Puerto Rico. RMI announced last December that all 10 of the microgrids had been completed.

“The project included the installation of sufficient battery and solar capacity to back up school libraries, administrative offices, kitchens, and critical water pumps indefinitely in the event of an outage,” RMI said at the time. “Additionally, the project provided roof waterproofing, energy efficiency retrofits such as LED lighting, and curriculum support for teachers.”

When the earthquake struck this week, it knocked out power across Puerto Rico, Earther reported on Tuesday. By Wednesday, electricity had been restored to only about a third of the island’s customers, Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) said, according to CNN. But the schools that had microgrids continued operating.

“The grid is down but the systems are working,” Roy Torbert, principal at RMI Islands Energy Program, told Microgrid Knowledge. “I think what you can learn from the microgrids and the way they’ve performed is that so much of community resilience is happening from the bottom up.”

Maria decimated Puerto Rico, killing nearly 3,000 people and causing $90 billion in damages, Wood pointed out. Then the entire island lost power in April 2018 when an excavator accidentally downed a transmission line. Meanwhile, PREPA’s leadership has been in flux, adding to the uncertainty. Before Maria hit, PREPA had filed for bankruptcy.

Last summer PREPA published a plan from Siemens Power Technologies International that made recommendations for the utility’s energy supply resources over a 20-year span. The plan called for modernizing the transmission and distribution grid, and creating electrical islands called MiniGrids that function like “zones of resiliency.” With the latest destruction on the island, however, it’s unclear how soon any of those changes could happen.

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