After the catastrophe caused by 2017’s Hurricane Maria, many Puerto Ricans were left without electricity for months. Now, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) has put forward a plan to radically reform electricity access on the Caribbean island.

The latest draft of the integrated resource plan (IRP) has been greeted with mixed reactions by environmentalists and clean energy advocates. Like many Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico has long depended on electricity generated from imported fossil fuels. The new plan has a heavy emphasis on utility-owned solar energy with battery storage but also involves constructing three new terminals for the importation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to be burned to generate electricity.

The Sierra Club de Puerto Rico has celebrated the movement towards renewable energy, although the organization remains vociferously against the planned privatization of PREPA. The NGO’s Environmental Justice Organizer, Adriana Gonzales, is blunt about the problems facing Puerto Rico.

In a recent Sierra Club statement on the IRP, Gonzales notes that “during Hurricane Maria hundreds of people died simply because they couldn’t keep their insulin refrigerated, or their oxygen machines running. We need the solar and storage in this plan so we can protect health and safety through the next hurricane with distributed, reliable energy infrastructure. I’m also proud to see my island taking the lead in addressing the climate crisis. Puerto Rico, a small island burdened by punitive debt obligations, could soon be leading the U.S. in the adoption of new solar technology.”

What’s Next For Puerto Rico?

In the IRP, PREPA lays out the future development and recovery of the islands’ electricity grid for the next 20 years. The move should allow for the better allocation of resources and for the utility to improve its service to the public. In addition, it notes what factors may impact the future supply of electricity such as new regulations, physical assets, and risks from natural disasters.

Tesla has met with the Greek government to propose ways to modernize the electric grid of the country’s many islands in the Mediterranean sea with microgrids and renewable energy to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.

Several Greek islands are relatively remote and rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their electric grid.

Over the years, Tesla has acquired some experience in building microgrids to power remote islands using solar panels and its energy storage systems, like the Powerpack.

On the island of Ta’u in American Samoa, Tesla deployed a 1.4 MW solar array and a 6 MWh energy storage system with 60 Tesla Powerpacks back in 2016.

It enables the islands to cut back significantly on its use of diesel to power generators.

The company has since deployed many similar systems in Samoa, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and many other places.

Now they want to do something similar in Greece.

The Greek Minister of Environment and Energy, Mr. George Stathakis, confirmed last week that they have met with Tesla to discuss the deployment of microgrids in Greek islands.

They issued the following statement (translated from Greek via Capital.gr):

“Today, the Minister of Environment and Energy, Mr. George Stathakis, met with Tesla executives in order to exchange views on the strategy of fossil fuel dependence on the islands of the country, especially those not connected in the next years with the mainland power grid. The National Energy and Climate Plan provides for a gradual abandonment of oil burning units and a switch to Renewable Energy Sources (RES). However, the stochastic character of photovoltaic or wind power action creates significant energy storage and recovery needs of modern network management technologies.

The extremely interesting thing that emerged from the meeting is that technological progress has now significantly reduced the cost of energy storage. At the same time, successful competitions for new RES investments in Greece, led to an equally significant reduction in the cost of energy production. As a result, the conversion of the islands to RES, apart from being environmentally useful, is now also economically viable. In this context, cooperation with Tesla can prove to be extremely beneficial, as the American company officials have highlighted, showing strong interest in the initiatives promoted by the Ministry for “smart” and “energy” islands.”

Tesla has reportedly already suggested a pilot project to demonstrate their microgrid system in the region.

The government would like it to be on the island of Limnos:

The electric utility sector is at a crossroads between centralized generation and distributed energy resources (DERs), with 2018 DER deployments exceeding additions for centralized generation. Microgrids represent one platform that can transform DERs into systems that offer resiliency services outside of traditional utility service offerings. While utilities historically have viewed the islanding functionality of microgrids with suspicion, many are now investigating what role they could/should play in this market.

Microgrids are inching their way into the mainstream, although the majority are deployed by non-utility vendors for third parties. However, growing interest and regulatory support for community microgrids and microgrids designed to bolster the overall distribution system are opening the door for utilities to play a larger and undefined role.

The VERGE 18 Microgrid Summit in Oakland, California, made clear that utilities are beginning to explore new microgrid strategies in the United States. The East Coast recently led the charge in microgrids in response to major grid outages caused by extreme weather. However, California’s recent wildfires also have increased pressure on utility companies to boost resiliency on the West Coast. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company is partnering with Humboldt County community choice aggregation and others to create a microgrid supporting critical facilities — including an airport in an isolated part of northern California.

The Midwest is also making strides in the microgrid field with the Commonwealth Edison of Illinois plowing new ground and working with Siemens AG to create new DER platforms. The platforms can be deployed to help manage envisioned future fleets of microgrids that are designed to offer grid benefits to integrate and manage growing DER fleets. Such efforts around the concept of clustered microgrids are beginning to overlap with related concepts such as investments in virtual power plants and DER management systems.

Duke Energy blazes a trail

Duke Energy has created a model blueprint for other utilities. It has discovered microgrid projects types that pass regulatory muster from a regulated business model while also providing strategic capital through its unregulated business ventures for new energy as a service microgrid business models.

Perhaps it’s my inborn bias towards news about technology companies (in my former journalism life, I covered the high-tech industry), but my mind keeps wandering this week back to the revelation in early November that software company VMware not only plans to build a microgrid at its Palo Alto, California, headquarters, it also is teaming up with its host city to design the installation.

The project is driven by one of the sustainability community’s frequent allies, the need for resiliency during emergency outages. In that regard, it is like many installations that have been greenlighted by the U.S. military (PDF).

VMware is pitching its own microgrid as a potential backbone for a far more responsive emergency response system, something that every California municipality must be considering keenly as wildfires rage across the state.

The project is also important because of what these partners hope to learn about technical hurdles (integrating microgrids is not for the faint of heart!) and about effective collaboration (many legacy policies are in place that make orchestrating an installation such as this inherently frustrating; all minds on deck).

Few details of what will go into the VMware “proof of concept” are available, only that the microgrid will combine renewable electricity generation (probably solar), energy storage capacity and software that will integrate it with Palo Alto’s municipal utility infrastructure.

The other thing that intrigues me is the identity of one person likely to be involved with getting this thing off the ground — at least behind the scenes. Akamai’s former senior director of sustainability, Nicola Peill-Moelter, joined VMware this month as director of sustainability innovation, a job change she tweeted about last weekend. Given Peill-Moelter’s role in helping catalyze one of the industry’s first “aggregated” power purchase agreements with Apple, Swiss Re and Etsy, I suspect that VMware won’t be afraid to break some rules with this microgrid.

Speaking of breaking rules, another system you’ll want to watch closely is being planned by the Port of Long Beach, the second busiest seaport in the United States, in collaboration with energy management company Schneider Electric.

The small island nation of Palau in the western Pacific Ocean has moved a step closer to having what is said to be the largest ever microgrid spanning diesel, solar and battery energy storage.

A 30-year power purchase agreement (PPA) has been signed with France-based ENGIE EPS, a microgrid and energy storage specialist arm of power giant ENGIE. The project was originally developed by US-based distributed energy provider GridMarket.

The system, known as ‘Armonia’, will include existing diesel generation alongside up to 35MW of solar, for which land has already been secured, and up to 45MWh of battery storage. On completion the Palau grid will then have an installed power capacity of 100MW and renewables will account for more than 45% of the country’s demand. Much of the current diesel usage will be displaced, thus reducing carbon emissions and generating substantial savings on Palau’s energy bill.

Palau is targeting 45% renewables by 2025 and a 22% reduction in its energy sector emissions below 2005 levels and the new microgrid is expected to help the island nation reach that goal five years ahead of schedule. The archipelago of several hundred islands in Micronesia had a population of 17,889 in 2017, according to an ENGIE EPS presentation.

GridMarket’s contribution to the project included deploying its machine-learning platform and predictive analytics to map out a national energy transition strategy specifically for Palau. It later selected ENGIE EPS to implement the project.

Construction is expected to begin by the end of this year with commissioning forecasted before the end of 2019. It has been funded by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).