![]() Maria blew through the island in a matter of hours, but what was left behind wasn’t just traditional hurricane damage. “All of this is just the beginning,” Conty said. Across the island, residents already beset by water and food shortages are also facing real threats of contamination that have already spread illness and worse. But all of the signs around us showed that the battle had been-at least for now-lost. For Conty, an old-guard environmental warrior in the countryside, Arecibo had been one of the key battlegrounds in her groups’ fights to contain poisons that affect much of Puerto Rico. Arecibo was a ghost town.īut Conty’s dismay was also about the destruction that couldn’t be seen. The Río Grande de Arecibo that cuts through the municipality remained an swollen brown expanse, still threatening to drown bridges and homes. Smokestacks had been snapped in half and wires lay slack where giant power pylons had fallen. Obliterated houses marked the deserted hamlets along the road. Here in Arecibo, a small municipality about 40 minutes from San Juan on a good day, high-water marks from the flood stood out on building walls, seven or eight feet high. Three weeks after the storm, the tropical green was just starting to come back, sprouting over the brown wounds of mud and giant trees pulled up from their roots. We’d followed the path that Hurricane Maria’s eye had taken along the highway to the west of San Juan. She scoffed at the radio reports of the official death toll, a common refrain among Puerto Ricans whose personal stories-a cousin who died needing dialysis here, a neighbor who simply hasn’t been heard from there-when multiplied 3.5 million-fold make the official estimate seem impossible. Construction kicked off at the end of last month.ARECIBO, P.R.-“There’s no way there were just 45 deaths,” said Myrna Conty, an environmental activist whose work takes her regularly across the most remote parts of the island. If the system is not operational in 100 days, the technology will be provided for free. Musk made an audacious bet to solve the Australian state’s energy woes by building a 100-megawatt battery storage farm. Musk’s Twitter conversation with Rosselló is similar to his back-and-forth with Australian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes in March, which eventually led to South Australia’s massive lithium ion battery project. territory as it tries to restore its badly damaged power grid. ![]() Tesla has already sent “hundreds” of its battery systems to be paired with solar systems to the U.S. Such a decision would be in the hands of the PR govt, PUC, any commercial stakeholders and, most importantly, the people of PR. The Tesla team has done this for many smaller islands around the world, but there is no scalability limit, so it can be done for Puerto Rico too. ![]() Musk got the ball rolling Thursday morning with a tweet saying that his company could build a similar system for Puerto Rico but noted that the project would need the government’s support. The company also built a 13 megawatt solar farm on the Hawaiian island of Kauai which includes nearly 300 Tesla Powerpack batteries, which provide 52 megawatt-hours of capacity and allows the farm to sell stored power during the evening. An estimated 109,500 gallons of diesel will be offset per year. The microgrid, which only took one year to build, features 1.4 megawatts of solar generation capacity (or 5,328 solar panels) and 6 megawatt hours of battery storage from 60 Tesla Powerpacks. Ta’u, an island in American Samoa, runs nearly 100 percent on renewable energy because of Tesla’s solar and battery storage-enabled microgrid. I have no doubt #Teslasolar will work w/#PuertoRico to globally showcase the power of its technology.” Rosselló also tweeted to the Tesla boss early Friday, “Let’s talk today I will be in touch. territory have electricity, the Department of Defense said Wednesday. ![]() Puerto Rico is still struggling without power a week after Hurricane Maria devastated the island. Musk tweeted back that he would be “happy to talk.” “Do you want to show the world the power and scalability of your #TeslaTechnologies? PR could be that flagship project.” “Let’s talk,” the governor tweeted to Musk Thursday evening. Ricardo Rosselló responded positively to Tesla CEO Elon Musk‘s offer to help restore the island’s hurricane-wrecked power grid with the company’s batteries and solar panels.
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