Lessons from Puerto Rico’s energy nightmare

What can the rest of the U.S. learn from the energy disaster that millions of fellow American citizens have endured?

Wherever I travel, political or ecological disaster seems to immediately precede or follow me.

My first ocean cruise sailed through the tail end of a hurricane. A month after traveling to Honduras, the country’s president was overthrown. Three days into a stay in a Kurdish, Turkish, and Arabic section of Paris, the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” phase kicked off.

So, I apologize to the people of St. Martin, Puerto Rico, and Haiti for visiting their wonderful islands last summer — and bringing Hurricane Maria in my wake.

Immediately afterwards, I was sad when comparing the photos my family had just taken with what we were seeing on TV. A patisserie on the beach of St. Martin now had the hulk of a car upside down on the patio where my daughter recently had her best-ever croissant. The tall trees we had seen swaying in a gentle breeze next to San Juan’s Castillo San Cristobal had been snapped like matchsticks.

But now, nine months after Maria hit Puerto Rico with 110+ mile-per-hour winds, I’m angry with what I see.

Or, more precisely, what I don’t see.

More than 100,000 Puerto Ricans still do not have reliable electricity. And, recently, nearly the entire island was blacked out, thanks to a single transmission line accident.

I’m old enough to remember the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, which knocked out electrical power in most of the Northeast United States and parts of Ontario for up to 13 hours. I especially recall being worried that my grandmother couldn’t get out of her high-rise apartment building in New York City. I can’t even begin to imagine what being without power for about 6,700 hours (more than 280 days) straight would be like.

And it’s not just island residents who have been affected. Until recently, hospitals in the U.S. were on the verge of running out of IV bags, because the leading manufacturer of the bags is based in a Puerto Rican facility with intermittent power.

Folks can debate how much human-caused climate change contributed to the ferocity of Hurricane Maria. But there’s no debate that Puerto Rico’s energy crisis was caused and is still being caused by humans.

What can we learn from the debacle, both for the sake of getting Puerto Ricans’ electricity up and running for good, and for the rest of us?

I’m not an energy policy expert, but I see at least six lessons:

1. Think local. You’re a utility planner, sitting on an island, hundreds of miles from the nearest oil well or coal mine, basking in the sun and enjoying a steady breeze. “Let’s ship coal, oil and natural gas into our ports, so we can burn it to produce all of our electricity” probably wouldn’t be the first idea that came to your mind. Yet, prior to Hurricane Maria, 47 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity came from petroleum, 34 percent from natural gas, 17 percent from coal, and two percent from renewable energy.

Potential solution? How about a big dose of solar, wind, efficiency, and where appropriate (as in Puerto Rico), tidal and geothermal power?

2. Over-centralization kills. Most of Puerto Rico’s electricity is generated by plants in the southeast, but used in the northwest (beach resorts) or the northeast (San Juan). So, when Maria knocked out 80 percent of the nation’s transmission lines, most of them traversing rugged, almost roadless terrain, people throughout the entire island were left powerless. The same thing happened when a bulldozer knocked out a single power line in April, blacking out 98 percent of the island.

Alternative? Expand the use of microgrids that allow communities to keep a far-away breakdown from turning off its lights. Installations of microgrids in Puerto Rico by Elon Musk and others have already made a big difference there.

3. Government ownership is no panacea. The island’s electricity has long been produced and transmitted by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), an agency run by representatives of the commonwealth’s government. Like its mainland equivalents, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the program was initially an enormous boon to the daily lives of ordinary people, the local economy, and to outside investors looking for inexpensive power for energy-intensive manufacturing plants.

But PREPA has had an additional problem that TVA and its counterparts haven’t had to deal with much. Its access to cash and credit has been hampered by the huge deficits run up by the rest of the commonwealth’s government.

4. But neither is privatization. Puerto Rico’s governor has announced that he intends to sell PREPA to private investors. But private companies have been responsible for many of the problems that have slowed the system’s post-Maria restoration. The bulldozer that caused the April blackout? A private contractor. The $9 billion debt that is strangling rebuilding? Private banks OK’d the plans for borrowing that money from them, and are still reaping the resulting interest.

The best option: A robust public-private mix of electricity producers and transmitters.

5. Don’t skimp on investments and maintenance. The average power plant in Puerto Rico is 40 years old. The $9 billion debt and the decline in revenue resulting from an economy that hasn’t recovered from the federal government’s elimination of industry-friendly tax breaks in 2006 have made it hard to maintain the current infrastructure, much less modernize it.

That’s created a vicious downward cycle that Maria exacerbated. For example, the island’s main transmission towers were designed to withstand winds up to 240 mph, higher than Maria’s worst gusts. However, PREPA didn’t devote resources to stop cable TV and telecommunications companies from draping their wires over the towers. That reduced the towers’ capacity to just 80 miles per hour. No wonder so many of them snapped.

Two changes would help deal with this problem:

• Electricity rates that “internalizes the externalities” — in other words, that require consumers to pay for all of the costs associated with electricity, including the impact of air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and land use disruption;
• Modernization, a commitment to maintenance, and a dedicated stream of money to make that happen.

6. Climate change is real and already wreaking havoc.

Just ask my brother, who frequently travelled to check on the Lutron manufacturing plant near the Reserva Natural de Humacao. The area was, as local press reports noted, “practically denuded of all vegetation.”

What’s needed? All of the above (and more), plus an attitude of extreme urgency.

Every utility in the U.S. — and around the world — faces similar problems, and can adopt similar solutions. At least in the U.S., we have a lot more money to throw at the problem without depriving people of a basic, decent standard of living.

Our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico will need our help in implementing those solutions. Most of the rest of the country can do it on its own, if we muster the political willpower to do it.

Let’s make sure we don’t have to go through a nine-month blackout to get moving.