This past year, something occurred in a small Puerto Rican mountain town that hardly made headlines outside of the trade press for renewable energy. That’s probably a mistake because, despite the fact that hardly anyone outside the industry has noticed it yet, what’s happening in Adjuntas may turn out to be one of the more significant energy stories of the decade.
Over the past few years, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been working covertly to develop a piece of software known as a microgrid orchestrator. This software allows several solar-powered microgrids to communicate with one another, share power, and balance loads in a manner similar to how a conductor oversees an orchestra. The team is currently in the last stages of hardware testing before implementing the tool in Adjuntas, where two community-owned microgrids will soon provide solar power even when the rest of the island goes dark. The Department of Energy funded the project with almost $4 million back in 2020.
It is worthwhile to consider the significance of Adjuntas. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, the town was without power for six months. For six months. Imagine operating a home, a clinic, or a pharmacy without grid power for six months. This is not some theoretical policy discussion taking place in a conference room in Washington.
When Hurricane Fiona struck in 2022, a smaller microgrid that was already in place at Casa Pueblo, the local community organization that collaborated with the Honnold Foundation on the project, kept the lights on for nine days in a row while much of the island lost power once more. Nine days is not insignificant. It’s the kind of information that causes you to reevaluate what “backup power” actually means.
As you stroll down Adjuntas’ main street, you’ll notice solar panels on the roof of Lucy’s Pizza, a regular pizzeria that is now connected to a microgrid that serves fourteen nearby companies that have committed to offering emergency services following a storm. That is almost endearing—a pizzeria turning into an essential piece of infrastructure. It’s the kind of information that never appears in a press release but reveals more about resilience than any chart could.
The actual functions of the orchestrator software are perhaps more significant but less obvious. By allowing multiple microgrids to work together and share solar power and battery storage over a small network, the tool lessens the need for diesel generators, which are costly, noisy, and polluting to keep running in an emergency. It remains to be seen if this method scales smoothly to larger, messier grids elsewhere. Adjuntas may have been an exceptionally forgiving testing ground due to Puerto Rico’s geography and close-knit community structure.
The concept of microgrids is not new. There are currently over 10 gigawatts of installed microgrid capacity in the United States, distributed among military installations, college campuses, hospitals, and a few notable community projects. In Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, ComEd constructed a utility-run microgrid that powers over a thousand homes; in California’s Blue Lake Rancheria, a tribal nation operates its own solar-and-battery system; and, strangely enough, on Alcatraz Island, solar panels and batteries subtly replaced diesel generators that used to generate nearly half of the park’s electricity emissions. The hardware isn’t what makes Adjuntas unique. It’s the networking.
Those who keep a close eye on this area believe that the next significant change in the nation’s perspective on resilience may come from connecting microgrids rather than constructing them as isolated, one-off projects. Texas seems to be heading in that direction, even though the 2021 winter blackouts have left scars. So is California, for reasons related to wildfires that anyone who has followed the news there is sadly familiar with by now.
It’s difficult to ignore how unglamorous the actual technology is—software controlling power flows between solar arrays and battery banks, nothing ostentatious, nothing you’d see in an eye-catching keynote presentation. However, while everyone else is distracted, unglamorous things have a tendency to subtly alter infrastructure. What happens in Adjuntas during the next severe storm season will likely determine whether this specific tool becomes the model for the rest of the nation or just one excellent concept among many vying for attention and funding.
