After the catastrophic category five Hurricane Maria ripped through Puerto Rico, millions of residents were left without power. Even weeks after, approximately only 10 percent of residents have power, according to Puerto Rico’s government status.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA), is now saying that his company’s solar power division, SolarCity, can help possibly help restore power in Puerto Rico.
"The Tesla team has done this for many smaller islands around the world, but there is no scalability limit, so it can be done for Puerto Rico too, such a decision would be in the hands of the PR govt, PUC, any commercial stakeholders and, most importantly, the people of PR." Musk tweeted Thursday morning.
Puerto Rico Governor, Ricardo Rosselló, tweeted back at shortly after: "@elonMusk Let's talk. Do you want to show the world the power and scalability of your #TeslaTechnologies? PR could be that flagship project,"
Then Musk tweeted back earlier Friday morning, “I would be happy to talk. Hopefully, Tesla can be helpful.”
It is already confirmed that Tesla has sent a number of battery systems to Puerto Rico to help store energy from the island’s existing solar panels. Then later on, SolarCity will be handling installations that involves large batteries along with solar panels and solar roof tiles to provide a renewable energy source for the island.
When Musk said in his tweet that the team has built solar panel grids on islands before, he was referring to Tesla power grid in Kauai in Hawaii. The only difference between is that Kauai only has a population of 65,000, while Puerto Rico has a population of 3.4 million.
Originally, the solar power grids were usually intended for smaller populations, like Kauai, but Musk has said that the grids would be able to scale up to larger populations.
0 Comments