Puerto Rico's Solar Microgrids Beat Blackout

Does anyone have a good link/step-by-step for doing some sort of home solar system where:

- it's sufficiently small-scale that no building permit is required

- it looks nice enough that neighbors won't complain

- the wiring is essentially plug-and-play

The best approach I've been able to come up with is to purchase a medium size battery pack such as is used for glamping (glamour camping), plug it into the wall and connect my refrigerator and a couple of other high-draw appliances to it (basement dehumidifier comes to mind), build a small roof for the back deck, using poured footings with short posts and then attaching the vertical pillars for the roof to that (which should side-step the need for a building permit since it's not a permanent structure), then placing the solar panels on that roof and running a wire to the battery placed in the kitchen.

Solar power is working wonders for rural and urban Pakistan. In fact, we became the largest importer of solar panels.

Just taking the article’s title at face value, what does it mean to have a blackout with microgrids?

Microgrids are, by definition, impervious to blackouts.

If a microgrid loses power due to a fault, neighbouring grids are unaffected. If all the neighbouring grids lose power due to a common fault, but your local grid is unaffected due to design or implementation choices, you’re golden.

Microgrids aren’t a solution to blackouts, and blackouts are not an issue microgrids have.

Looking at the article, the first paragraph claims:

When power went out across all of Puerto Rico on 16 April [well, clearly it didn’t as the very next sentence goes on to claim] a lot of the lights in the town of Adjuntas stayed on.

It can’t be both. It’s not a blackout and the lights stayed on.

Grid segmentation and multiple generation sources can do this too, and is a common feature of existing, traditional, power grids. The city I live in has these features with feed-ins from multiple hydro electric plants and wind factories, and a HVDC link to the next state over which has a full spectrum of generation sources bar nuclear.

As a result, the electricity here is very stable, and I don’t recall the last time we had even a brown out that affected the entire greater metro are and satellite towns.

Microgrids with interconnects are grids.

We can build grids that work, thereby leaving the general population free to pursue other, more important, economic endeavours.

Failing that, build microgrids.

I don't know much about electrical grids, but I'm wondering if something like this concept could help South Africa with its endlessly struggling electrical grid problems. My city constantly has power outages and the majority of people cannot afford installing solar into their homes.

I love solar, but this "those who can afford microgrids can shield themselves from blackouts" paired with net metering where "the wealthy get paid a premium for excess generation and can buy expensive high-demand power back at a discount" probably aren't steps on the path to improved grid resiliency for any definition other than this weird "no island-wide outages" definition.

So the bit thats not clear here is are they defining rules for what happens when there are interconnection failures?

or is it that to connect to the grid you need to have your own storage as well as PV? it sounded like they joined three "islands" together.

Meanwhile, in third-world, overly bureaucratic Italy, one has to wait several months to get all the paperwork in order to take advantage of a solar installation. Self-deployed solutions are also limited to 800 watts, which is peanuts in today's world.

Is this more of a battery cost issue - if you owned a battery that charged off the grid and discharged during blackout periods then that might just about cover you if you budget for the expected outage duration.... And assuming you can afford said battery in the first place.

I would love to have just enough solar to flatten my peak usage on the hottest days of the summer. They naturally coincide with tons of sun. I don't need a huge system to be all solar all the time or even care about credits from the power company. I just don't want a $300 bill in the summer and a $50 bill in the winter. Has anyone designed a good solution for this?

I keep seeing these "grid synchronizing" inverters that don't require transfer switches and can generate to offset the energy pulled from the grid - in the event of a full grid outage, you can always manually hit the disconnect and run the home - provided the load doesn't surpass the generation capacity (or storage capacity if running with batteries).

It seems like this hasn't really made it's way into North America, which is unfortunate as it would lower the barrier of entry for home solar considerably vs traditional grid-tie/net metering which requires a ton of permits, electricians, meter changes, disconnects (or transfer switches) and generally lots of delays and cost.

I would be very curious how the "migrogrids" interconnect in PR - it seems there is some kind of synchronization and neighborhood-level disconnects to isolate from the shared grid.

From what I understand, most homes that are connected to both solar and the grid require the grid to be active to produce solar. This is for two reasons. One, not to endanger lineman working on the grid. And two, the solar AC cycle must be synchronized with the grid AC cycle.

Are these homes not also connected to the grid? Or is there some technology that addresses these two issues that are in use in Puerto Rico?

Based on what I see in the photo in the article, PV array codes in Puerto Rico must be quite different from those in California, because the arrays seem to cover almost the entirety of the roofs. In California fire access codes [1] prevent the entire roof from being covered like in PV that.

1. https://energycodeace.com/site/custom/public/reference-ace-2...

my prediction, for the US: electricity demand from AI will exceed supply at least in the short and medium term, driving up electric prices for consumers

This article looks like it completely embraces the pov of solar providers, and describes maintenance of the grid as serving the interests of the fossil electricity industry.

...And not far from the end:

> The next milestone, Massol-Deyá says, will be successfully connecting microgrids that are not in close geographic proximity.

Yeah... great journalism here IEEE.

i live in puerto rico. I talk with my luma friends all the time, we need baseload. We need more gas. We've made huge investments in solar that have been destroyed by hurricanes and are a huge waste issue.

technological advances for off/tied grid solar are now maturing into high quality solutions for all scenarios, costs are in free fall. I was an ultra early adopter of solar pv in 1991 in Takilma, Oregon living in a school bus,and continue to live off grid in Nova Scotia. As to Peurto Rico, my first question was answered by a quick look at a topograpgical map, and Peurto Rico looks a lot like Nova Scotia....lots and lots of hills and little valleys and rivers, which means that for them topography has a big part to play, also looking at pictures of the instalations there, basic roofing is clearly a price consideration before other things, so developing solar that assembles into a physical roofing product, that entirely replaces other roofing, would be important for anyone who is carefullt crunching numbers on a new build in a choice location, add in charging for cars and scooters which can double as extra house power when needed and the inevitability of the comming switch becomes obvious.

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They should buy a nuclear power plant instead. Only nuclear power plants can prevent blackouts.

I don’t have data but I have a hunch most blackouts in PR are weather related. In that case (stormy skies), solar probably won’t help much.

My hope for America is once Optimus robots are up and running, have 1-2 legions worth work 24/7 setting up a huge farm in Arizona, then creating an energy transition line to the east coast.

It sounds crazy, but given the rate of advancements in robots and the fact that solar panels are already mass manufactured, why isn’t this feasible in 2 years?