In an interview with USA Today, Rosselló said, “I told him because of the devastation, if there is a silver lining, we can start re-conceptualizing how we want to produce energy here in Puerto Rico and distribute it and do it in a more reliable fashion.”
The problem Puerto Rico has is common with other islands – They lack the local resources for energy, meaning everything has to be shipped in, and in Puerto Rico’s case, this means coal and oil. In the continental United States, cheap natural gas can be delivered by pipeline. This means that in Puerto Rico, electricity runs about three times higher per month.
In changing his focus to Puerto Rico’s power grid, Musk announced on Saturday he was pushing back the unveiling of the Tesla Semi to November 16 and concentrating on fixing the bottlenecks on the Tesla Model 3 and increasing battery production at the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada.
Musk says the company has received some 450,000 pre-orders for the Model 3 but that production has been hobbled by a bottleneck in “manufacturing subsystems.”
In The Friday night call, Rossello and Musk spoke about rebuilding the island’s power grid with Tesla technology, including a pilot run in the island-municipality of Vieques, which still pulls its power from Puerto Rico. The inefficiency of Puerto Rico’s power grid has been the center of many discussions, even before Hurricane Maria hit the island.
Many experts say the experience gained in bringing solar energy technology to Puerto Rico could eventually change other parts of the world.
“I think entities like Tesla are going to be part of that story,” said Francis O’Sullivan, director of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Energy Initiative. “They should look to integrate today’s newer technologies and not simply rebuild the old system we had.”
On Saturday, Rosselló met with a bipartisan group of five U.S. senators, who visited the island still in the throes of the disastrous effects of the hurricane 17 days ago. Over 99 percent of households are still without power and because the water supply is tied to having electricity, nearly half the people have no drinkable water.
