Puerto Rico

Sunrun, a US-based residential solar installer, says nearly 1,800 customers have already signed up to its PowerOn Puerto Rico virtual power plant (VPP). The program deploys stored solar energy from customers’ batteries to the grid, preventing power supply shortfalls on the island.

Portable solar generators are making their way from the fringes of solar and energy storage to become a mainstream consumer item. The rise has been charged by a range of factors that have created massive brands. Where did the sector emerge from, who was buying before, who is buying now, and what’s next? Tristan Rayner reports.

While distributed solar and storage are advancing quickly in Puerto Rico, utility-scale solar and storage procurements ordered by regulators in 2020 have made little progress.

Diesel generators have been the workhorse of disaster relief for decades but as the frequency of extreme weather events rises, so do calls to decarbonize the emergency response. Sustainability may not be the only benefit to using solar in a crisis, as pv magazine discovers.

Depcom Power has commissioned a 90 MW solar plant linked to 51.5 MW of battery storage in Salinas, on the southern coast of Puerto Rico.

Land is scarce but water is abundant for the Caribbean’s 700 islands. Solar economy professor Christian Breyer tells pv magazine that the region’s archipelagic makeup is not a drawback but a benefit for renewable energy generation, with the ocean potentially serving as the area’s floating solar PV backbone.

Luma Energy supports more than 54,000 customer connections in its 21 months as grid operator.

The US government has introduced a new funding package to support residential solar and storage projects in Puerto Rico, followed by resilience solutions such as microgrids, community solar, and grid modernization.

Rapidly deploying 5.2 GW of planned solar and storage in Puerto Rico, a possibility raised in a report by six national laboratories, would require an improvement in the Puerto Rico utility’s practices. A mandated procurement process has suffered delays at many steps.

Puerto Rico’s latest procurement exercise is the second round of a tender scheme designed to allocate 3.75 GW of renewablesd capacity and 1.5 GW of storage.