How Solar Microgrids Can Save Puerto Rico
Image courtesy of California Energy Commission under Attribution 2.0 Generic Deed, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
Solar microgrids could help rescue Puerto Rico’s power grid, which is in bad shape due to decades of tremendous mismanagement and underinvestment. The question is – how effective can this technology really be?
How Solar Microgrids Can Come to the Rescue in Puerto Rico
The decades of neglect inherent across the Puerto Rican power grid culminated in a near total collapse caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017. This event caused outages that lasted for months and killed almost 3,000 residents. Despite $20 billion in U.S. federal relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Puerto Rican grid has yet to fully recover due to bureaucratic red tape and local politics.
This backdrop of political infighting and mis-managed federal funding has spurred the development of privately funded solar-plus-storage systems across the island. Approximately 4,000 of these solar microgrids are being installed each month, and the big advantage is that they can continue to provide power even during largescale power outages.
As of March 2025, over 1.1 GW of distributed solar capacity has been connected to the grid. In total, solar power currently provides nearly 13% of the island’s total annual power consumption, a huge percentage that is expected to exponentially grow.
This concept is being optimized even further via “orchestration,” which is a decentralization strategy that connects solar microgrids together, without integration into the grid, to allow them to exchange power with one another. This ensures that if one installation goes offline, the others can continue to seamlessly operate.
In other words, solar microgrids represent a bottom-up approach that could dramatically enhance the island’s reliability, even with the island’s main grid suffering from a multitude of problems.
In the final analysis, the reliability of the Puerto Rican power grid can be improved without the burden of investing in centralized repairs and upgrades. With solar microgrids – and a little luck – the island’s power nightmare could be solved in relatively short order.
