Page 61 - Green Builder Magazine Jan-Feb 2018 Issue

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Martin O’Malley
Join Martin at the Green Builder
Sustainability Symposium in January.
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58-60 GB 0118 SUS Symposium.indd 59
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system whose primary fuel for its 40-year-old fleet of generators
is heavy fuel oil and diesel—the most expensive and polluting
petroleum products on the planet. A power system whose antiquated
grid wastes 14 percent of the electricity it produces while burning
the dirtiest of fossil fuels.
And every imported barrel that the people of Puerto Rico buy
is dollars that leave the island, that no longer circulate, that are no
longer available to lift Puerto Rico’s economy.
Now is the opportunity to restructure. Now is the time to realign
profit motives to renewables and resiliency. Now is the time to
rebuild Puerto Rico’s electric grid
with a human purpose. “What has been
As Chris Burgess, director of
projects at the Rocky Mountain destroyed needs to
Institute/Islands Energy Pro- be rebuilt. Why not
gram, explains, “The new-age util-
ity is no longer the sole monopoly build it in a way that
producer of energy, but rather the allows Puerto Rico
facilitator of a dynamic grid—a
grid where we all participate, we to generate its own
all consume. Now—thanks to de-
clining solar and wind costs—we electricity in ways
can all produce.” that are more
A full transition to renewable
energy and micro-grid resiliency resilient to next
in Puerto Rico will produce thou- year’s hurricanes,
sands of new jobs in engineering,
construction, maintenance and better for its own
operations. economy, and less
A new grid designed for redun-
dancy and resiliency with distrib- expense for its
uted generation (generation in
various places spread across the consumers and
island’s grid: rooftop solar, solar businesses?”
parking lots, solar farms, solar on
brown fields, on-shore wind, off-shore wind and the latest technology
for storage capacity) is more reliable and more resilient to extreme
weather and monster hurricanes.
Other countries like Denmark, Costa Rica and Ecuador have
demonstrated the capacity to go to 100 percent renewables while
making their countries more secure and prosperous at the same
time. Other islands like Ta’u in American Samoa, Bonaire in the
Dutch Antilles and Kaua’i in the Hawaiian chain have all shown the
capacity to thrive on renewables. So too, can Puerto Rico.
NGOs like the Rocky Mountain Institute-Carbon War Room
and others have been actively partnering island states like Saint
Lucia, Saint Vincent and Montserrat to transition from expensive
and volatile imported fuel oil to domestic renewable energy with
accelerated success.
The island state of Hawaii has declared a goal of 100 percent
renewable energy by 2045. And the economics are already
accelerating the speed of progress to goal. The Hawaiian island of
January/February 2018 GREEN BUILDER 59
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