Fast forward 3 years..........and not much has been done. On St Thomas and St John some massive composite line poles have been added, and there's plans to bury all the lines in several more congested "downtown" locations on both. But nearly all production remains propane or diesel, depending on who the zombie utility can squeeze another fuel contract out of. There's a decent sized array at the airport on St Thomas, and Donoe solar farm is
being rebuilt a bit larger(5MW).
What I've seen over the last couple years as these islands try to come back from the 2017 hurricanes is that more and more villa owners are installing isolated solar+battery systems. The Water And Power Authority(WAPA) charges something like $.40-.52/kWh, so there's massive incentive for homeowners to go solar. The fact that there's basically no grid compensation for excess production means you pretty much need a battery. All that's done is take the wealthier homeowners out of the loop and leave the regular folk behind to pay increasingly high rates.
Now we see WAPA and the USVI regulators have
released a revised net metering policy. Given the level of corruption, it's not surprising to see the level of grid compensation is a joke and this will only make it worse. Previously there was a limited true net metering program where homeowners go credited the retail rate of $.40-.52/kWH, not that'll be tied for some reason to 75% of the "Levelized Energy Adjustment Clause", or what currently amounts to 11 cents. On top of that there's a $250-700 connection fee plus $20/month net metering fee.
Not only is this new program mandatory for all new solar customers, but anyone under the old net metering plan needs to pay these fees as well. So what's gonna happen? The slow exodus of ratepayers will turn into a flood. And those who remained on the grid, now have great incentive to just leave altogether by up-sizing their array and battery. It's sunny pretty much all the time down there and grid blackouts occur almost daily, so it doesn't take much solar+battery to get to a much better standard of service.
It's great to follow these island scenarios because it's a fast-forward microcosm of what's gonna happen across every grid eventually. Costs are more extreme, so catastrophe arises quickly, and change is forced in a matter of just a couple years. These longstanding corrupt utilities have been disrupted, are standing on half a leg, and just need a tiny push to topple over. Every day is exponentially worse than the last as costs build up and the ratepayer pool shrinks.
For Tesla this means not just TONS of Powerwall sales in the immediate term, but microgrid interconnection and likely full utility level services in the near future. 400MWh worth of megapacks, a dozen windmills, a few more 5MW solar farms, and true net metering is really all that's needed to turn the page and immediately start saving money. All working of the Autobidder platform
There's a guy named
James Ellsmor who's becoming kind of an island sustainability guru. Talk about a genius win-win career to move into. May reach out to him and see how we could go about crafting broad strokes for a grid production rebuild in the USVI. Maybe send Elon a tweet or two.
Corruption will be tough to get through, but they're about at the limits of what people can possibly pay for electricity and no one really wants to sell them more propane or diesel on credit. They're ripe for a Dept of Energy overhaul with someone like Tesla at the lead.
