• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Puerto Rico’s march to 100% renewable electricity holds lessons for Nigeria’s urban cities

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The island of Puerto Rico is taking proactive steps through a legislative bill, to move its electric system to 100 percent renewable energy and this serves as an example for many urban cities in Nigeria.

Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico’s power grid and plunged the island into the longest energy blackout in U.S. history, an incident stakeholders on the island wish will never happen again.

Unlike Nigeria that is yet to explore the full opportunities in its renewable energy space,  Puerto Rico’s power grid is about experiencing a paradigm shift thanks to a current renewable energy bill mandating the island’s electric system to move towards 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

Nigeria is failing to maximise its own renewable energy potential despite analysts projecting that Africa’s most populous nation could generate 600, 000 MW by deploying solar photo-voltaic (PV) panels from just 1 percent of Nigeria’s land mass.

Stakeholders also believe that given the high level of solar radiation in the northern part of Nigeria (about 5.0-7.0Kw.m2/day), utilising solar power generation in the northern part of the country has potential to steadily increase the power generation capacity in the country.

Meanwhile, U.S.’ 3.20 million people strong island’s energy bill authorises a move to 100 percent renewable sources, like solar power, and energy independence by 2050, and its timeline has been sharply accelerated to require 40 percent renewable energy by 2025 and 60percent by 2040. The bill also exempts energy storage systems from sales tax.

The bill has already passed the Puerto Rico Senate and is being sent to the House for reconciliation; thereafter get the assent of Governor Ricardo Rossello.

Puerto Rico’s largest non-utility electricity supplier Sunnova is excited that the island is joining other states like Hawaii, California, Washington D.C., and New Mexico in their commitment towards 100 percent renewable energy.

“Given the abundance of sun on the island, we believe that solar will be able to play a significant role in meeting the 100 percent goal,” Sunnova’s vice president of policy and communication Meghan Nutting told USA today.

Puerto Rico’s electrical system has been in a state of disrepair for decades and controlled by Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), a public corporation that controls energy generation and distribution on the island.

Sunnova, which has 65,000 solar customers in the U.S. and its territories, began selling solar panels in Puerto Rico in 2013 as an attractive alternative to costly PREPA services. The company quickly became the island’s solar leader. Today, it has about 10,000 residential solar customers in Puerto Rico – or more than 90 percent of the total residential solar market on the island.

“Knowing Puerto Rico is an island prone to strong storms and the vulnerable state of its power grid, Sunnova officials should have more aggressively sold customers solar systems with a battery source that could be used off-grid,” Tom Sanzillo of the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis told USA Today.

With three states such as Hawaii (100 percent renewable by 2045), California (100 percent zero-carbon by 2045), and Washington D.C. (100 percent renewable by 2032), already having a mandate to move towards 100 percent; the addition of Puerto Rico and a bill in New Mexico mandating 100 percent zero-carbon electricity will give a combine population in these five areas of 47 million persons, or roughly 14 percent of the total U.S. population.

And this may be only the beginning, as the governors of a number of other U.S. states have also expressed plans to move their states to 100 percent renewable energy. Also, more than 100 U.S. cities have made commitments to move to 100 percent renewable energy, including Chicago, which at 2.7 million persons is the largest city in the nation to make such a commitment to date.