How to Address Energy Justice in Puerto Rico’s Energy Transition
University of Puerto Rico researchers who worked on the PR100 share their insights and recommendations.
The results of The Puerto Rico Grid Resilience and Transitions to 100% Renewable Energy Study, or the PR100, were announced in February. (PR100.gov/results )
The main takeaway from the study was that “Puerto Rico can feasibly transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050, but significant system upgrades and investments — guided by meaningful community participation — are needed to get there.”
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The study was led by the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). A team of researchers from the University of Puerto Rico also contributed studies and insights to the PR100.
Marcel Castro-Sitiriche is a professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, and he worked on the PR100 with the UPR team which included Agustin Irizarry-Rivera, Lionel R. Orama-Exclusa, and Eduardo Lugo-Hernández.
Castro and others have for years been sharing their insights and recommendations for managing the grid transition and the larger energy systems transition, while accounting for resilience and energy justice.
One such report, True cost of electric service: What reliability metrics alone fail to communicate, by Robert Garcia Cooper and the UPR team, was published in The Electricity Journal in April.
They’ve done this work around the PR100 specifically since November 2023. I’m sharing some of those PR100 memos with added context from me.
Capturing Effective Metrics for Resilience Energy Justice
Before we get into this first set of takeaways, I’ll define a couple of terms, using DOE definitions.
Achieving energy justice is “the goal of achieving equity in both the social and economic participation in the energy system, while also remediating social, economic, and health burdens on those disproportionately harmed by the energy system.” (Initiative for Energy Justice, 2019).
Energy resilience is “the ability of the grid, buildings, and communities to withstand and rapidly recover from power outages and continue operating with electricity, heating, cooling, ventilation, and other energy-dependent services.” (Energy Resilience)
Key Insights from “Resilience Energy Justice and Rooftop Solar Photovoltaic Mitigation Alternatives”
• The main recommendation to capture an effective metric for Resilience Energy Justice is to use the total time of power service restoration to 100% of the clients affected by a major event. Special emphasis on the last 5% of customers restored is needed to effectively identify mitigation strategies to overcome vulnerability to long power outages.
• The number of deaths resulting from a long power outage needs to be prominently included in resiliency metrics, although its analysis requires a complex systems approach.
One of many issues that emerged after Maria was the misreporting of deaths / cause of death. This was due, in part, to how the circumstances are reported or categorized.
Reuters: Puerto Rican death toll from Hurricane Maria 73 times official tally: study
• The focus on the resiliency of electric services, which includes the electric grid, needs to replace the explicit or implied emphasis on grid resiliency. People need resilient electric power service, and often the grid is not the best way to deliver it.
This goes back to the need for a decentralized grid model. This includes mini grids, microgrids, individual rooftop solar, batteries and other solutions.
IEEE: How to Harden Puerto Rico’s Grid Against Hurricanes
The Impacts of Blackouts on Mental Health
Energy burden is defined as the percentage of gross household income spent on energy costs, according to the Department of Energy. A household with a 6% or greater energy burden is considered to be a high energy burden household.
In Puerto Rico, the energy burden is higher than the U.S. average for all income groups, and 35% for very low-income households, compared with 12% for low-income households in the U.S., on average.
Key Insights related to outages from “Comprehensive survey of residential photovoltaic systems in Puerto Rico”
The work led by Eduardo Lugo as part of the UPRM team’s contribution to the PR100 focused on a questionnaire that includes the impact of blackouts on mental health, for the Office of Energy Justice and Equity led by Shalanda Baker.
• One of the main results from the study is that 92% of the participants with mental health diagnoses reported that their mental health symptoms worsen with electric blackouts. The majority of people reported experiencing feelings of anxiety, frustration, anger and desperation when experiencing blackouts.
• The study found that 29% of participants reported having 3 or more weekly blackouts, and 44% reported that it takes more than 4 hours on average to regain service.
• When asked about what appliances or equipment are essential for them to power during a blackout, respondents identified refrigerators (99%), fans (77%), stoves (35%), and respiratory therapy equipment or respirators (30%).
• Study of PV adoption found that 27% of the sample have a solar energy system, of which 95% have batteries. The majority of study participants (66%) that do not have a solar system, indicate that cost is the main reason for not having one. 78% of those participants have no plan to purchase a solar system during the next year.
• Energy justice is a key element for people’s health. Results revealed that 30% of the sample had some medical equipment that needed to be powered by electricity. The two most commonly needed types of equipment were respiratory therapy equipment or respirators, and refrigerators (for insulin or other medication).
• Energy burden is an area that needs more research as study results show that 60% of participants pay more than $100 monthly in their electric bill and 26% pay on average more than $200.
The Adoption of PV Systems with Batteries
Before we get into this next section, let’s address LUMA and PREPA.
LUMA Energy is the power company that, since June of 2021, is responsible for power distribution and transmission in Puerto Rico. They’re also in charge of maintaining and modernizing the power infrastructure.
LUMA was contracted to work with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) in managing the island’s power. PREPA was made solely responsible for electricity generation.
Forbes: Can Puerto Rico Rebuild Its Electric Utility?
Puerto Ricans have been protesting against LUMA since at least October 2021, all the while dealing with continued excessive power outages.
The Washington Post: An arrest warrant, a fugitive CEO: Puerto Rico’s effort to privatize its electrical grid is off to a rocky start
The Hill: Why are some Puerto Ricans demanding the island cancel its contract with power company LUMA Energy?
In short, people can’t, nor do they want, to rely on a centralized, privatized, electrical grid.
From “Distributed rooftop solar photovoltaic generation adoption in Puerto Rico”
• The number of net metering clients is doubling every 15 months. In June 2021 LUMA reported 26,077 registered net metering solar PV systems. As of March 2023, LUMA reported 78,096 registered net metering clients. In 21 months, the number of net metering clients has tripled.
• The installed capacity of net metering solar PV systems is doubling every 18 to 19 months. In June 2021 LUMA reported 228 MW of installed net metering solar PV capacity. As of March 2023, LUMA reported 524 MW of installed net metering solar PV capacity. In 21 months, the installed net metering solar PV capacity increased by a factor of 2.3.
• Net metering clients are increasing by 1% of total residential clients every 5 months. And the newly installed distributed solar photovoltaic generation capacity with net metering is about 20 MW/month.
• The installed generation* capacity of net metering solar PV systems is doubling every 14 months. In June 2021, LUMA reported 401 MWh of installed distributed electric storage. In 14 months the installed distributed electric storage doubled, from 401 MWh to 807 MWh. This trend is persistent. As of April 2023, 21 months later, LUMA reported 1127 MWh of installed distributed electric storage.
*“Capacity” (MW) refers to the maximum amount of electricity that can be produced at any one time, and “generation” (MWh) is the amount of electricity that is actually generated over a period of time. (ClimateCouncil.au)
• In Puerto Rico, utility-scale renewables are not growing while distributed renewables are growing at an accelerated pace. In contrast to distributed electric storage, all tranche 1 utility-scale renewable energy projects (18 projects in total) are not under construction as planned due to “differences about the points of interconnection between LUMA and PREPA.”
Castro says these trends demonstrate that it is possible to have at least 4,000 installations a month. As far as hard goals versus trends for rates of installation, Castro says the UPR team supports the efforts of the Queremos Sol, or We Want Sun coalition, and the goals they have set forth.
The Union of Concerned Scientists: Queremos Sol Puerto Rico: a 100% Local and Extraordinary Resource
The Cost of Residential Solar Systems with Batteries
This memo regarding the cost of energy (COE) to customers was not part of the original PR 100 reporting.
Conversely, for more on the cost of *blackouts* to residents, check out the aforementioned “True cost of electric service: What reliability metrics alone fail to communicate.”
Key Insights from “Distributed rooftop solar photovoltaic plus batteries cost in Puerto Rico”
• In Puerto Rico, the average cost of energy (COE) of rooftop solar PV equipped with batteries, which provides resilience at the load, as of September 2023 is in the order of 15.5 cents per kWh.
• The cost of rooftop solar PV with batteries in Puerto Rico for the period between 2019 and 2023 results in a cost comparable to the negotiated price, of 10 cents to 15 cents per kWh, for the tranche 1 solar farms, which do not provide resilience to the loads.
• Although the numbers presented in this work show a stable COE for the period studied, there is a fundamental difference between the quotes analyzed, the most recent offers for 2023 are based on a government incentives program that tends to increase the total cost of the same system.
• A tendency for better COE’s when the system is designed for specific ranges of Inverter models has been noticed, where 4 kW, 6kW and 8 kW inverter ratings are standard, and widely available in Puerto Rico.
• Developers and the government must consider that COE is improved as the design of the system adjusts the amount of installed PV with the maximum rating capacity of the inverter and specifies an appropriate storage capacity for the system.
Data Visualization Dashboard
As of December 2023, Puerto Rico has 110,000 solar PV systems in net metering and 86,000 with batteries. This number of systems is combined for a total of 765 MW in PV capacity and 1.6 GWh of decentralized storage.
UPR graduate student Willian Alberto Pacheco Cano created a data visualization dashboard to continue tracking elements such as the adoption of solar systems (PV) in net metering and their batteries (BESS). The last update was April 24.
This first iteration of Connect Puerto Rico is a result of my time in CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creator’s Program.
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