A week after Puerto Rico was struck by
Hurricane Maria, nearly all of the U.S. territory’s residents are still without power. It will take years to recover from the disaster, but experts hope Puerto Rico’s future electrical grid will be more resilient in the face of the next powerful storm to hit the island. They’re advocating for more distributed power generation, less reliance on imported oil, and a digital smart grid letting workers locate trouble in real time. But with Puerto Rico already struggling with massive debt and a decade-long recession before the storm, the future is still far from certain.
Maria was the strongest storm to hit Puerto Rico in decades, destroying power lines across the island. In some areas, outages are
predicted to continue for months.
