With the past Hurricanes raging and destroying millions of dollars’ worth of capital and land, places are left with nothing. Puerto Rico has been one of the most affected by these past disasters, being an island and isolated they must rely on foreign help to get better. The biggest problem they face is getting power back to the Island since most it was wiped out. Puerto Rico’s power grid was bad before, having outages wasn’t uncommon for the people. Right now, the island imports and burns oil to generate electricity.
Luckily Elon Musk’s suggested that he could help rebuild their power grids using solar power. What that would suggest for them would be a more stable grid that could improve business with low costs in power. Having solar power energy is usually a long-term investment which pays off in the long run. A tweet from Elon has stated that “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…” One of the islands that Tesla is talking about is Kauai in Hawaii which hold around 70,000 residents, Puerto Rico, on the other hand, has 3.4 million residents. With that significant of a population raises concerns if it’s possible.
As of right now one of the biggest projects Elon has is creating one of the biggest lithium-ion battery to Australia. What this could potentially mean for the future is a reduction in the cost of power utilizing the land more efficiently. This project could potentially help 1.7 million South Australians. These technological advancements could eventually help parts of the world where they still have most of the people without power.
For more information
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/05/news/economy/elon-musk-puerto-rico-tesla-power-grid/index.html
http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/07/technology/tesla-elon-musk-australia-world-biggest-lithium-ion-battery/index.html?iid=EL
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/09/25/damage-puerto-rico-power-grid-unprecedented/8XnniwOHxWKqs2WYz5J8gM/story.html
Hurricanes have been hitting Puerto Rico for quite some time but none were as bad as this one. Puerto Rico like you said was already having issues with power before the Hurricane and this obviously made matters much worse. Elon Musk always seems to be finding a solution to the problems in the world and although I believe this is a fairly good idea there are bigger issues that need to be dealt with first. One of the bigger issues that needs to be dealt with involves finding clean drinking water for everyone to drink. Even though this is the primary mission, in the future I believe renewable energy would be a good idea because the residents of Puerto Rico pay the highest energy prices in the world and this would drastically lower them. This in return would help the islands economy and put the people of Puerto Rico on a better path. All in all I believe this is a great idea and will put Puerto Rico on the right path in the future.
ReplyDeleteIt seems a pretty good idea as in most cases such disasters leave many people in the darkness the ideal suggestions in this case can be implemented in other countries in fact this can be implemented all over the World which are able to afford.
ReplyDeleteI think the biggest thing Elon Musk has going for him in this situation is that Puerto Rico is desperate enough to give him an opportunity of this magnitude. PR will have to spend millions of dollars to get their electrical system up and running either way and with the island still facing uncertainty in regards to their debt, the cost-effect (long term), renewable energy may be the best solution. However, with the increasing trend of powerful storms hitting the Caribbean and Gulf, I question whether the solar power cells could withstand that kind of force from wind and debris. Telsa would probably have to invest more technology into weather resistance for the cells and batteries - which could also increase the costs.
ReplyDeleteWhat Elon Musk is doing for those smaller islands is amazing and it would be interesting to see how he would accomplish his goal in PR. He seems to be very active all around the world and I'm sure if this works out with PR that it would only be the beginning. PR has a lot of room to grow and I hope that it doesn't become too pricy for them to have these solar and battery systems. I thought of the same thing that Cory said; how would Elon protect these batteries? What would stop them from getting blown/washed away?
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