The director of Puerto Rico’s power utility Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica (AEE) said in a press conference that 240 MW of solar power will be added to the country’s energy system in the frame of a plan aimed at addressing the state of emergency of the electricity network.
This new installed power will come from an unspecified number of large-scale PV plants, whose completion is scheduled for June 2019, that would be built thanks to private investments. According to Ramos, all of these projects have already been contracted.
An additional 300 MW of renewable energy generation capacity would be installed at a later stage by June 2021, Ramos added, while another 200 MW of storage capacity would be installed in order to further support distributed generation.
All these projects will be part of a plan to add 1.5 GW of installed power, for which no specific technologies were pointed out and which is considered necessary to ensure power supply in the country.
Ramos said that the new capacity from renewable energy sources will enable a reduction of power prices, as it will make the energy system less dependent on prices of fossil fuels. Furthermore, Ramos said that he is aware that solar distributed generation will be responsible for a considerable loss of clients for AEE, and that, however, is favorable to this transformation of the energy system.
Ramos concluded by saying that all AEE’s income will be used for the implementation of this plan and to make the company “the electric utility of the future”.
The AEE had simplified the rules for net metering in February. The new rules allow a faster interconnection process for PV projects up to 1 MW and a one-step procedure for PV systems up to 10 kW. At the end of 2015, the country had approximately 60 MW of installed distributed generation PV capacity.
The energy crisis of Puerto Rico is strictly linked to its difficult financial situation, which pushed to government to say in 2016 it was not able to pay its debts of approximately $73 billion. Puerto Rico, which is an unincorporated territory of the United States, has requested the financial support of the U.S. in several circumstances.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
7 comments
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.