Abstract
After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico experienced the second-largest blackout in modern history, with parts of the island left without power for up to 18 months. Because the problems of Maria are multifold, this case study and review presents the historical, political, social, economic and cultural context of Puerto Rico, including a review of post-Maria solar interventions, along with two novel unconventional hybrid approaches to solving the problems of Maria: (i) Solar de Autogestion, a solar-energy racking that permits panel removal and storage in advance of a storm’s arrival and reinstallation after the storm passes—a system that was developed through (ii) collaboratory-action parachuting, a novel community-interaction method developed as an oral history-based applied-scholarship hybrid of conventional parachuting research and community-based participatory research. This paper finds that addressing the problems of Maria involves understanding the holistic context of a place and its people; working in partnership with communities to form collaborations; and providing disaster response, addressing climate change, and expressing allyship and solidarity with communities through hurricane-resilient solar energy to help create energy citizenship and an energy community. Befitting its unconventional methodologies, this transdisciplinary paper—which by its nature may not fit neatly into any single discipline—also takes an unabridged, critical and hybrid descriptive-normative approach to subject matter and style, coupling academic sourcing and discourse with quotes, narrative details and fluid writing in order to be accessible to academics, policymakers and practitioners alike.
Highlights
In September 2017—exactly two weeks after Hurricane Irma, a category-five storm, passed north of Puerto Rico but still caused extensive damage to the islandi, including a blackout for two thirds of Puerto Ricans—Hurricane Maria, a category-four storm when it arrived with winds blasting up to 155 miles (249 km) per hour, ripped through Puerto Rico, resulting in the loss of electric power across the island [1] and the world’s second-largest blackout in the history of electricity production [2]
Following the work of researchers who found that “the domain of energy, and in particular electricity, opens up important questions at the interface of social-ecological relations and the organization of collective life” in post-Maria Dominica [7], this case study and review of post-Maria Puerto Rico calls for new approaches to energy production—allowing for greater resilience to hurricanes—as well as the way that engagement is conducted with communities as part of disaster response in the Global South
These new pathways may help to develop energy citizenship for energy democracy and to illuminate post-colonial energy transitions in the anthropocene epoch, when climate change-induced warming leads to stronger cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons iv [8,9,10,11,12], and when ever-higher levels of carbon pollution from energy production necessitate an urgent and systematic transition to renewables [13,14,15,16] such as PV
Summary
In September 2017—exactly two weeks after Hurricane Irma, a category-five storm, passed north of Puerto Rico but still caused extensive damage to the islandi, including a blackout for two thirds of Puerto Ricans—Hurricane Maria, a category-four storm when it arrived with winds blasting up to 155 miles (249 km) per hour, ripped through Puerto Rico, resulting in the loss of electric power across the island [1] and the world’s second-largest blackout in the history of electricity production [2]. Following the work of researchers who found that “the domain of energy, and in particular electricity, opens up important questions at the interface of social-ecological relations and the organization of collective life” in post-Maria Dominica [7], this case study and review of post-Maria Puerto Rico calls for new approaches to energy production—allowing for greater resilience to hurricanes—as well as the way that engagement is conducted with communities as part of disaster response in the Global South These new pathways may help to develop energy citizenship for energy democracy and to illuminate post-colonial energy transitions in the anthropocene epoch, when climate change-induced warming leads to stronger cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons iv [8,9,10,11,12], and when ever-higher levels of carbon pollution from energy production necessitate an urgent and systematic transition to renewables [13,14,15,16] such as PV (solar photovoltaics). The question is: How do we solve the problems exposed by Maria?
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