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Five years after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the island is dark.

Five years after Hurricane Maria and, despite billions spent (hard to write “invested”), the grid is devastated.

This did not have to be. It should not have been.

Between Trump grandstanding (paper towels anyone?), profiteering and corruption, (racist) indifference, incompetence, misguided thinking and planning, and a myriad of other issues, there has been a near-utter failure to leverage Maria’s devastation as an opportunity to build a cleaner, less expensive, and more resilient Puerto Rican power system. The Biden Administration has a chance to flip the equation and, through the application of a basic principle, change the game in Puerto Rico and across the United States (and, yes, globally) as to how to leverage disaster response to lessen the future necessity for and costs of disaster relief. That principle:

Disaster 4Rs

Disaster 4Rs calls for integrating responsiveness investments and actions across the three phases post-disaster (relief, recovery, and reconstruction) with a guiding principle throughout those phases: resiliency.

When it comes to the post disaster space, a core lesson from hundreds of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations is that effectiveness (saving lives, reducing future risks, efficient resource use) requires coordination across organizations and coordination across phases.

By ‘phases’, these can be summarized as the Three Rs:

• Relief: Life saving and getting minimal functions going for preserving life and reducing damage risks.
• Recovery: Help society move into a functioning stage so that people don’t need to leave and outside assistance can be reduced.
• Reconstruction: Measures to boost economic and social strength to pre-disaster (or better) levels.

In terms of efficient resource use and increasing the odds for a successful outcome (which includes a lesser likelihood of having to do another relief operation tomorrow), integrating across these phases as much as (reasonably) possible is key.  If one can do something in the “relief” phase that  contributes to “recovery” and is lays foundations for “reconstruction”, to use a baseball analogy, it is like hitting a triple.

For example, think housing. Whether earthquake, war, or a hurricane, disasters often devastate housing stock and displace people. Tarps and tents are great for immediate shelter and are (relatively) low cost and easy to deploy. While fantastic for relief, tents are marginal for recovery, and perhaps even negative for reconstruction. Instead of tents, deploying container-housing unit, like the US and allied militaries have used in places like Bosnia-i-Herzegovina and Iraq, blends from relief (quickly on site, quick to install) into recovery (housing elements that can stay around awhile).

Now, a container is more expensive than a tent — but that is a lasting investment rather than a (hopefully very) temporary path to the problem. A less expensive option comes from leveraging disaster-focused architectural options that can put local labor to work and leverage local materials to have permanent structures up in a day with about the same amount of transported in materials and total financial cost as occurs with a tent (and far less than a container). 

That lead to a fourth R: Resiliency: if that measure helps contributes to the potential for reducing future risks, investment returns are truly hitting a grand slam. Staying with housing, deploying container units and building locally with plans and ways to incorporate these into rebuilt infrastructure with high-wind and earthquake resistance makes that ‘shelter’ investment into a grand slam home-run solution. .

Distributed renewable energy is the blaring example of how to integrate across Disaster’s 4Rs  As the grid gets knocked down, in places around the world, the diesel generators kick in and disaster relief organizations send in even more generators. That translates into high-cost and high-pollution demand for diesel fuel — which, by the way, undermines the Three Rs through resource demands (transportation of that diesel fuel that conflicts with other demands on the logistics’ system and, of course, the cost of fuel strains limited financial resources).  With the price revolution in renewables (especially, in this context, solar photovoltaics (pv) and associated systems), the costs of going ‘green’ across phases, rather than using polluting diesel generators, is significantly advantaged to the clean energy option.

And, unlike the diesel generator, it is quite straightforward to integrate a solar system across the 4Rs. Deploying distributed systems that have the ability to grid-connect become, as the grid reestablishes itself, part of the grid system – generating electricity throughout all phases and providing assurance of (at least limited) electrical services in the face of the next disaster.

And, also unlike the diesel generators, such renewable energy systems boost economic prospects in the recovery and reconstruction phases: free electrons from the sun not only save money compared to imported diesel, they also don’t contribute to transportation bottlenecks and lessen resource requirements in grid investements.

Hurricane Fiona has shut down the Puerto Rican electrical system. Almost certainly, generators and diesel fuel for generators will be a major element of early relief deliveries.  Solar panels should be a major element in US government relief efforts.

Just as with Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Fiona’s impact on Puerto Rico is hard to fathom – there is likely not a single sector, not a single community without major (even crippling) damage.  Energy is critical to the 3Rs across all these sectors. Looking at Puerto Rico’s electricity situation, any honest analysis would conclude (differing, of course, as to specifics designs, how much, ..) that a rapid deployment of micro-grid solar would prove a Disaster 4Rs grand slam.

President Biden’s team — leveraging resources already legislated in the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Act bills along with disaster relief resources — should put together a (large) package for making distributed renewable energy (including storage) core to Fiona disaster relief. A relatively modest, in the face of the travesty of Puerto Rico’s power system and Maria’s/Fiona’s damage, $200 million program over 18 months would drive roughly 200 megawatts of solar capacity along with significant amounts of battery storage. Done right, this program would create well-compensated employment while boosting Puerto Rico’s capacity for additional distributed energy deployment while reducing the island’s cost of and pollution from generating electricity while enhancing resiliency against and reduce damage from future climate-crisis enhanced hurricanes.

Disaster 4Rs isn’t just for Puerto Rico

For US disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) needs to update its approaches — clean energy systems need to be a growing part of the ‘fly away’ kit for helping get emergency power to communities blacked-out by disasters (like New York/New Jersey post Sandy and New Orleans post Ida).  And, the US government requires an integrated approach to this so the ‘fly-away’ solar is done in a way that enables rapid creation of renewable-powered micro-grids, ready to be hooked into a reestablished grid, to address relief that facilities recovery and contributes to reconstruction.   And, the installations should proceed down a path so that the next time a climate-enhanced disaster hits the community, the solar keeps the lights on and lowers the costs/challenges of that next disaster’s 3Rs … truly a grand slam payoff.

NOTE: To be clear, that clean energy — distributed clean energy — should be Puerto Rico’s future isn’t exactly a new idea. Among the organizations doing work on this, CAMBIO is very much worth paying heed to. As promoted by Mark Ruffalo, an ISLR Local Energy Rules episode (and blog post) provides an excellent introduction to Cambio’s work. Also, the situation hasn’t been static. While the utility has been lackluster (at best) in terms of renewable energy, many organizations and people have deployed solar and batteries over the past five years. As per Canary Media,

As of January 2022, some 42,000 rooftop solar systems were enrolled in the island’s net-metering program — more than eight times the number at the end of 2016, the year before Hurricane Maria struck the island, according to utility data. Thousands more systems are operating but are not officially counted because .. they aren’t connected to the grid.

Thus, while 100% of utility customers weren’t getting power from the grid, there were (are) 10,000s of Puerto Rican households, businesses, and community organizations who likely maintained (perhaps minimum) power due to distributed clean-power generation and storage.