Puerto Rico’s Hydrogen Microgrid Extends Outage Survival

On the nights after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico’s power grid in 2017, former Puerto Rican energy regulator Javier Rúa-Jovet remembers watching the sky warp along the horizon as thousands of fossil fuel-powered generators spewed emissions into the atmosphere. The “whole society” was running on this carbon-intensive backup power at the time, says Rúa-Jovet. Now, nearly a decade later, at least one of Puerto Rico’s microgrids is getting a clean upgrade.

On the small island of Vieques, 10 miles east of mainland Puerto Rico, a team of Cornell University researchers is deploying a first-of-its-kind clean hydrogen-enabled microgrid on a local farm. The project will include a solar-plus-battery system that will provide electricity for on-site hydrogen production. The hydrogen will then be compressed and stored in on-site gas cylinders for later use in fuel cells that can power the island’s essential services during grid outages.

The architecture builds on existing hydrogen-based microgrids, like a 293-megawatt-hour one installed in California’s rural wine country in August 2025 by the utility Pacific Gas & Electric. That system runs on batteries and hydrogen fuel cells, but doesn’t include on-site solar power, and involves trucking in the hydrogen rather than producing it there.

Vieques’ system, meanwhile, will use an on-site, solar-powered electrolyzer to produce hydrogen that can then be used in fuel cells. The hydrogen part of the microgrid can provide power when the solar array can’t–such as during the periods of low solar output that are common following storms. The plan is to use the system to power essentials like a health clinic, refrigeration, and drinking water pumps.

If the strategy works in Vieques, the idea is to apply it to other communities, says Cornell’s Héctor Abruña, the Puerto Rican researcher leading the project. “It’s eminently deployable just about anywhere, and so we make a point that this solution should be scalable and particularly good for isolated – which are almost always also forgotten – communities,” Abruña says.

While the economics of hydrogen production have historically rendered the technology unviable in most cases, a community like Vieques is one specific instance where the costs might just balance out.

Puerto Rico Tests Hydrogen Microgrid

Backup power generation has long been a part of Puerto Rico’s culture. Storms and a legacy of disinvestment in the territory’s grid infrastructure have led to frequent blackouts that leave residents without electricity for days at a time. This has forced residents to turn to gasoline or propane-fired generators, and increasingly to solar-plus-storage.

Vieques, a community of around 8,000, receives power from Puerto Rico’s grid via undersea cable from the main island and does not have its own source of baseload power generation. This leaves the community particularly vulnerable to outages. When storms roll through, days of cloud cover…