Energy attorney Morten Lund was quoted in Bloomberg’s Environment & Energy Report in an article titled “Microgrids, Storage Could Make Puerto Rico Grid More Resilient,” published December 1, 2017. The article discusses the collaborative effort by the U.S. Energy Department, other agencies and Puerto Rico to develop plans to transform the country’s electric grid to make it better able to withstand future hurricanes—by such means as microgrids, energy storage and renewable energy generation.
Microgrids show potential for increasing the resiliency of the island’s electric grid because they consist of electricity sources, and possibly energy storage systems, interconnected to a localized distribution network—reducing reliance on a larger-scale transmission system that can be damaged by natural disasters.
The agencies are also evaluating building new renewable generation facilities, such as wind and solar, on the island, which currently gets only two percent of its electricity from such sources, but Lund cautions that integrating renewables into the grid may not happen quickly.
“The regulatory and financial framework that’s in place makes it near impossible to do this in a drastic shift on a dime,” he said. “Physically there are not obstacles, but there are structural obstacles: societal, financial, and regulatory. Our whole system is set up to make change difficult, and this would be a big change really fast.”