Dale Louda is executive director of CHP Association. He spoke at the Puerto Rico Energy Redesign Forum on Friday, October 27, Rayburn Building, Washington, D.C.
Dale Louda: Some of these microgrids are particularly good because they're not from just one central power station. There might be a variety of different sources across the island that can be used at the appropriate time.
The most important part we take for granted here is that reliability and resilience angle though. You've got to have the critical infrastructure, hospitals, prisons, the key infrastructure. If you have a loved one that's going in for surgery, obviously you need that power. It cannot go out for even a fraction of a second. But those are easy to figure out.
We also have to remember that even like the food supply, a lot of these food supplies, if you lose the power just for a short amount of time, even just for a very short amount of time, that the entire product could be wasted. So that ability to have a reliable and resilient and flexible power structure, I think is the basis for the future's development of the system.