Puerto Rico's Power Crisis

Power grids are made up of the generating plants, transmission lines, substation, transformers, and the distribution lines. Most of these were destroyed by Hurricane Maria in September 2017, and still to this day thousands of Puerto Ricans still don’t have power. This is not good for anyone. Since people don’t have electricity, they are using generators to power their homes. Generators are devices that convert gas into electrical power for use in an external circuit. These are helpful but only for a little amount of time. An entire island cannot run on the power created by a generator.

Puerto Rico's government want to upgrade and change the entire power infrastructure, but for that, they need to first give it power. According to Vice News, "Hurricane Maria destroyed 80 percent of the island’s electric grid, but the unprecedented blackout isn’t just due to the storm." Humans also played a role here. Puerto Rico's Electric Power Authority needed at least about 53,000 poles, 17 million conductors and 184,750 insulators. Another big issue with the government is that they are in debt, and can't really afford any of it.

Power Lines down after the storm

1,200 temporary generators and seven micro-grids were powering key areas near important buildings such as schools and hospitals. Without these many more people would have died. Furthermore, an important factor to think about when putting back power is the terrain and the mountains in Puerto Rico. This makes it very hard for the workers and their trucks and tools to get to where they are needed, which is one of the biggest problems right now.

One of the biggest companies working on helping the island is Tesla. They created new solar projects to help restore power, but this only works for Culebra and Vieques. They are arranged micro-grids that help power buildings until the main power grid is back on.

Tesla's Solar Panels

Overall, there is still a lot to work on to figure out how to prevent disasters like this to happen again. The government, especially, needs to work on getting the whole infrastructure updated so that millions of people don't suffer like they did for over 6 months.

Links to learn more:

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/kznwwa/why-its-so-hard-to-get-the-power-back-on-in-puerto-rico

https://www.wired.com/story/why-cant-we-fix-puerto-ricos-power-grid/

https://www.inverse.com/article/45511-tesla-solar-elon-musk-reveals-the-staggering-scale-of-puerto-rico-projects