The PR100 Study Reflects NREL’s Efforts To Support Communities

By Martin Keller, Director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Last month I was in Puerto Rico, along with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and others, for the long-awaited public event to release the PR100 study results.

I don’t need my arm twisted to get me to go to a warm place for a break from winter. But in this case, I’d been looking forward to the unveiling of the Puerto Rico Grid Resilience and Transitions to 100% Renewable Energy Study (PR100) final results.

I wasn’t alone. The anticipation was high given the project’s complexities and duration and the significance of the foremost conclusion: that Puerto Rico can feasibly transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050.

However, it will require significant system upgrades and investments—guided by meaningful community participation—to achieve much-needed energy system reliability in the near-term (outages are still a regular occurrence) and help Puerto Rico reach its longer-term goals. And there’s no time to lose. This territory is at a unique crossroads, vulnerable to the effects of climate change, so this transition is vital.

It took a coordinated effort funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and led by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), collaborating and leveraging the unique tools and capabilities of six national laboratories.

Several dozen NREL staff were involved in this analysis and the ongoing technical assistance for Puerto Rico.

Yet as important as all these contributors are to the process, the real focus was on the people of Puerto Rico. Their voices were key.

Through stakeholder engagement, researchers came to understand that the resilience provided by highly distributed energy generation and storage was a top priority for many in Puerto Rico. This in turn drove the creation of scenarios to answer questions about trade-offs between a highly distributed energy system and a more centralized one.

Many of those stakeholders are familiar with distributed photovoltaics (PV) and storage, and—even given the relative expense—see widespread adoption as a pathway to saving lives in a future where hurricanes are projected to be more frequent and intense. Even with widespread adoption of distributed PV and storage, all PR100 scenarios also include utility-scale solar and storage and assume system upgrades to ensure that demand can be met reliably.

PR100 provides a roadmap. This is a great example of how NREL really is connecting its mission with the reality of people’s everyday lives.

Puerto Rico and its approximately 3.3 million residents are still recovering from the one-two punch of Hurricanes Irma, which devastated the U.S. Virgin Islands and eastern areas of Puerto Rico on Sept. 6, 2017, and Maria, a high-end Category 4 storm, which made landfall in southeastern Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017.

Again, our researchers listened to stories and testimony. And they subsequently found ways to respond—charting real solutions to the threats of climate change.

The communities and tribes we work with will achieve their clean energy and renewable energy goals, each taking a different path based on local priorities.

As I mentioned in my brief remarks at the results unveiling, expected benefits from the PR100 guidance include improvements in safety, security, health, and economic opportunity in Puerto Rico. Equally important, Puerto Ricans can live their lives knowing they have support.

And that’s essential to everything we do. We’re not in an ivory tower and never have been. We are in the world, confronting real problems. NREL’s vision—a better energy future for the world—similarly could be achieved via many different paths, informed by meaningful participation with our funders, partners, and each other. We appreciate the opportunity to make such meaningful contributions.