When a natural disaster provides an opportunity to take a new approach to infrastructure
The recent passage of Hurricane Maria through Puerto Rico, a territory already hard hit by economic crisis and mired in debt due to disastrous fiscal policy, has left a desolate landscape of mud, along with widespread destruction that has left the island largely without electricity and most of its infrastructure, which had already been devastated by Hurricane Irma a few weeks before. The result is almost three and a half million people lacking food, water, fuel and shelter.
More than 80% of the country’s power lines is estimated to have been destroyed by the hurricane. Only some 10% of the country has electricity, and it could take months before the grid is repaired. Reconstruction efforts have been hampered by the fact that the country, a territory of the United States, but not a state, cannot technically go bankrupt and thus shed its huge debt, making it difficult to obtain the money and the resources it needs. Puerto Rico’s recovery depends practically on donations, volunteers and unconditional aid.
What role can technology play here? As soon as the hurricane hit, a group of volunteers in New York, the city with the largest Puerto Rican community, began a mapathon to establish the degree of devastation throughout the territory, an essential task to begin organizing help. Also almost immediately, Tesla began sending hundreds of units of its Powerwall batteries to the country to try to mitigate power outages, while Google applied for Federal Communications Commission (FCC) permits to deploy its Project Loon, no less than thirty balloons capable of quickly restoring part of the telecommunications infrastructure. In a tweet, Elon Musk said the company’s systems had already been used to build solar supply systems on several small islands, had no scalability limit, and could therefore potentially be used in Puerto Rico if its leaders wanted. The response of the governor of the country, Ricardo Rosselló, also through Twitter, was almost immediate, offering the country as a experiment to show the world the capabilities and scalability of the company’s products.
Could Tesla rebuild Puerto Rico’s electricity infrastructure based on solar power? Everything indicates that the hugely ambitious project is viable, albeit expensive. Puerto Rico’s electric power generation capacity in 2014 was 20 billion kWh, with 47% from oil, 34% natural gas, 17% coal and only 2% from renewables, mainly from two wind farms. Compared to Tesla’s facilities on islands like Kauai, in Hawaii, or its mega-project in Southern Australia, the largest in the world so far, rebuilding Puerto Rico’s infrastructure would be a Herculean task. However, the potential impact on a country with a very high external debt, without natural energy resources but with an abundant sun, could be equally colossal.
Technology therefore offers support at two levels: on the one hand, it speed up reestablishing key services such as telecommunications and energy by sending state-of-the-art equipment to meet those needs. Obviously, no one in Puerto Rico expects the future of telecommunications to depend on a series of balloons, or for electricity supplies in hospitals, airports or other strategic installations, to depend on batteries. But at the second level, technology offers the potential of so-called leapfrogging, in other words, rebuilding destroyed infrastructure not using the technology used when they were originally built, but the best one available today. Taking into account the numbers required to rebuild pre-existing infrastructure, could Puerto Rico switch from renewable energy making up 2% of its mix, to much higher percentages, helping to stabilize its balance of payments in the process?
Obviously, it is not simple. Tesla’s has said of its flagship project in South Australia, that if the system is not installed in one hundred days from the signing of the contract, it will be free certainly made the headlines, but we are talking about a system that, despite being the largest lithium ion battery in the world, generates 129 mWh, several orders of magnitude below the needs of a country like Puerto Rico.
Obviously, Tesla cannot afford to do this for free, and the true cost would be way beyond the means of Puerto Rico. If such a system were to be constructed, it would surely be one of the best and greatest efforts undertaken as a result of a natural catastrophe in history. Fall all that technology is more efficient and sustainable, building a country’s electricity infrastructure from scratch is a macro-project that can only be undertaken over a long period of time and with a careful combination of public and private funding.
When it comes to understanding the potential of technology, cases like Puerto Rico can help us contextualize, separate myths from realities, and put things in perspective. Would we like a country, after a natural disaster, to depend largely on renewable energy? The idea is a tempting one, but does it make economic sense? In the long run, and for a country that does not generate its own energy resources, it certainly does. It sounds great. But what is not going to be, above all else, is… cheap.
(En español, aquí)
