Microgrids in Puerto Rico will fail – inevitable corruption

That’s even harder than it sounds. Puerto Rico would have to stabilize its existing, oil-burning generators while simultaneously building out the supergreen ultraresilient grid of the future … while also dealing with billions of dollars of debt, worries that bondholders will take money meant for hurricane relief, an inability to attract new capital, and a bankrupt Prepa. Right now Puerto Rico has no regulatory structure to understand who will own solar microgrids, how they’d connect to the existing grid or the grid of the future, and how to make sure their owners don’t price-gouge their users. “I’d like to imagine that everyone believes that we need an electricity system in Puerto Rico,” Fisher says. “But it appears from the outside that there’s a lot of political infighting about who will take charge of the process.”

Engineers love a chance to fix a problem. But these challenges are borne of failure and incompetence. It’s fine to celebrate technical improvisation—people cobbling together battery-powered refrigeration for their insulin and tech companies donating solar panels and battery systems. I’ve done some of that lionizing myself. But those kind of stories also tacitly accept the lack of a formal infrastructure—and in one possible timeline they enable privatization. Indeed, privatizing Prepa is already a possibility. The risk is that cheering on high-tech fixes (instead of embracing a big plan like the one in the New York report) will give a weak, cash-poor government cover to corporatize the grid instead of fixing it.

This disaster wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t even wholly natural. It was a disaster of policy. Puerto Ricans shouldn’t have to be this resilient. They should have a functioning power grid.

The 2018 hurricane season starts on June 1.