Photo: Casa Pueblo
For two weeks after Hurricane Maria, Lucy’s Pizza was the only restaurant open in the mountain town of Adjuntas whose 18,000 residents had no electricity. Now, owner Gustavo Irizarry is one of 14 downtown merchants who have invested in the island’s first community-owned solar microgrid. In 2017, Hurricane Maria damaged 80% of the grid, and Puerto Ricans still suffer regular outages while spending, on average, 8% of their incomes on electricity. Casa Pueblo installed its first solar panels in 1999 so despite Maria, locals could charge phones, run dialysis machines, and store medications in its refrigerators. Casa Pueblo distributed 14,000 solar lamps provided by the diaspora, has helped fund and install more than 350 solar energy systems in town, and built a public solar park where locals charge phones from solar arrays. Irizarry and the 13 other investors formed the Community Solar Energy Association of Adjunta, a nonprofit utility that reinvests in community solar projects, prioritizing the most vulnerable.
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