Project Details
Overview/Objective
After decades of maintenance and financial challenges, Puerto Rico’s electrical system was dealt a knockout blow by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017, which resulted in a widespread blackout that left some Puerto Ricans without power for almost a year. The Caribbean island suffered subsequent long-term outages after earthquakes in 2020 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022, and frequent blackouts continue to impact Puerto Ricans day-to-day due to the condition of the electrical grid and the limited capacity of Puerto Rico's current power plant fleet.
In response, the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico passed the Puerto Rico Energy Public Policy Act (Act 17) in 2019, which aims to repair and revitalize Puerto Rico's electrical infrastructure while switching to energy sources that are 100% renewable by 2050. The legislative assembly already had the funds to pursue this goal, with $20 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies. How it would invest these funds was an open question, however.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and six DOE national laboratories assisted in creating the PR100 Study, a two-year, comprehensive analysis of possible pathways for Puerto Rico to achieve its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2050, improve energy justice and fortify its energy system against extreme weather events and other natural disasters.
As a part of this effort, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Water Power Program examined and quantified Puerto Rico's available hydropower resources, and assessed the potential for using the island's non-powered dams (NPDs) for hydropower generation.
Results
During the first six months of the study, ORNL provided flow, head, energy, and cost estimates for 35 of the existing dams in Puerto Rico. ORNL researchers also worked with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) to determine the status and linkages of the various dams and whether they are powered are non-powered. The results of this assessment were used to provide direct support to the PR100 team in modeling capacity expansion in Puerto Rico.
Since then, ORNL has further evaluated the hydropower potential across Puerto Rico, including running sensitivity analysis of different rainfall, runoff, and streamflow modeling approaches. Additional work will also be conducted to estimate power and energy potential using consistent methodology applied during a concurrent NPD resources assessment across the contiguous U.S. (the lower 48 states). The team plans to publish a dataset of the historical simulated streamflow in Puerto Rico and incorporate the NPD assessment results into a broader, national dataset managed by ORNL, a final report and associated online material.
Impact
ORNL research provided a detailed analysis of Puerto Rico's potential growth through powering non-powered dams, the results of which were incorporated into the final version of the PR100 report, issued in February of 2024. The team's work will give the DOE and decision makers in Puerto Rico clear, accurate, and useful information about how hydropower could be used to strengthen the island's electrical system, expand its energy generation capacity, and achieve its goal to derive 100% of its energy from renewable sources by 2050.
