Welcome back to Infrastructure Kos after taking Memorial Day Weekend Sunday off. The subject of this diary isn’t just the destruction of Puerto Rico’s electrical grid from Hurricane Maria and the problems rebuilding it, but the pernicious meme plaguing infrastructure initiatives that tech billionaires could be a solution.
Hurricane Maria, once a powerful Category 5 hurricane with an top wind speeds of 175 mph and a barometric pressure inside the eye of 908 mbar(1), slammed into Puerto Rico as a still powerful Category 4 hurricane on the morning of Wednesday, September 20, 2017, near the Yabucoa municipality. Sustained winds at the time of landfall were 155mph.
It matters not whether Maria was a very strong Category 4 or a “weak” Category 5 storm upon landfall, as the Saffir Simpson scale, which is used to assign the categories, is based on damage. And for hurricanes over 155mph, everything is pretty much destroyed and the extra 20 mph makes little difference.
Devastation to the Island was extensive, as seen in the nighttime satellite images taken before and after the storm.
Everyone knows what happened next. As Adam Serwer notes, the cruelty is the point of the Trump Administration, where “Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” All the cruelty towards the island of Puerto Rico has been well documented by the inestimable Denise Oliver Velez in her constant vigil for the island these past 620 days, and there is no need to attempt to duplicate her words here. But let’s go back to the hours and days after landfall, when word of the magnitude of destruction was just getting out.
Tech Billionaires to the Rescue!
It was just days after the first images were coming out, and Trump’s FEMA response was already faltering, in part deliberately so, when the centrist Governor of Puerto Rico lit the neoliberal bat signal.
Elon Musk responded to that irresistible call by promising that he could rebuild Puerto Rico’s power grid with solar panels and Tesla Powerwall Batteries:
Tesla’s involvement in Puerto Rico first surfaced a week after the storm, when Tesla employees were on the ground assisting with efforts to connect buildings with power. The company previously confirmed it had shipped hundreds of Powerwalls to assist in that effort.
But a week later, Musk personally intervened, replying to a link posted to Twitter and elaborating how his company could help rebuild the island’s electricity system. Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Rossello then reached out to Musk via Twitter, inviting the head of Tesla to get in touch.
NYT Bestselling Author Anand Giridharadas is stunned the meme of billionaire saviors is so ingrained in our society that a Governor would call for help not from the Federal Government (who admittedly was hostile to the Island), but from a corporate CEO.
“The idea that we can be saved through billionaire whims is truly incredible,” says the author and former New York Times foreign correspondent, who has spent the last several years researching a book that will be published in late August, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.”
But decades of Government being the problem and not the solution talking points, airing day and night on the media over which the right wing and corporations hold a death grip, will do that. And Musk, with a penchant for thinking he can solve the World’s problems, gladly stepped in to help.
Workers from Tesla, billionaire Elon Musk’s electric car and solar energy giant, arrived on Vieques just weeks after hurricanes Irma and María crippled the aging electrical grid and severed the transmission cable that connected this island to the Puerto Rico mainland seven miles west.
Success!...
Tesla made good on its promise. The company selected a senior center in Vieques as one of 11 sites on the darkened island to equip as a microgrid with power-producing panels and batteries. Musk diverted production from his troubled Model 3 to provide his Powerwall batteries (when a line of car batteries would have worked just as well in an emergency). Tesla provided the solar panels and all the other necessary equipment. Construction of the microgrid was actually simple.
... inside the mint-green, one-story Ciudad Dorada senior center, fans blow cool air and refrigerators stocked with insulin and other medicines run cold even as the noon sun broils in a cloudless Caribbean sky. On its roof are a set of Tesla photovoltaic solar panels, attached via cable to a pair of Tesla batteries hitched to the wall beneath….
That sound’s great! Let’s check out back…
...And yet, a diesel generator growls on full blast behind the center.
Needless to say, Tesla’s intervention was a complete failure.
Why did Tesla Fail?
The following is one of my favorite sayings in Engineering:
“everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” — Mike Tyson
We live in a Nation where, for 40 years, a minority has made government fail for their own political (and, more aptly, financial) ends. We also live in a country with strong property rights and strong environmental regulations. And yes, strong bureaucracy. This makes building things in the public sphere frustratingly difficult.
But as with everything else in life, privatization is never the answer. Leave engineering to those who serve the public, and get punched in the mouth on a daily basis for it. And one thing that will punch even the best is the need to factor in lifecycle cost to any proposal.
What are lifecycle costs? Well, it’s not enough to just build something. You have to maintain it after you build it. You can’t devolve the costs of maintenance to others. In fact, building something may often be the cheapest and easiest part of the infrastructure project.
“We see it with off-grid systems all around the world, where well-intentioned organizations will install systems, get a lot of PR, get funding upfront, then they leave,” Smith said by phone. “And there’s a disconnect between the PR and the reality on the ground.”
The best way to avoid this, Smith said, is for companies or foundations that fund these projects to put aside extra money to hire and train maintenance staff.
Donating 20 years of maintenance costs doesn’t give the same headlines (which, in turn, doesn’t do the same for stock prices), even if Elon Musk was cognizant of the need to do so in the first place. And that’s the point. Civil Engineers are trained to think holistically about their initiatives and always have the good of the public in mind. The qualification of tech billionaires all to often was being in the right place at the right time.
Tech Billionaires are Never the Answer
The impetus for this diary was not just the tragedy of Puerto Rico, but also a diary by our own Mark Summer.
Billionaires in space: Bezos and Musk are creating the future, whether you like it or not
Like our electric grid, space belongs to all of us, not just the wealthy. This has nothing to do with personal preferences for futuristic outcomes and everything to do with whether we as a society should accept putting the public good in the hands of unaccountable billionaires here in the present; the same billionaires who may not think holistically about their proposals and may not have the public good in mind.
Just days after the Huffington Post ran the story on Tesla’s failure in Puerto Rico, Elon Musk’s other venture, SpaceX, just launched sixty 500-pound satellites into space the other day. It was a success of rocketry. The purpose was to demonstrate their ability to ultimately launch tens of thousands of similar satellites. These tens of thousands of small(ish) satellites are intended to be a part of something called Skynet Starlink, which will connect all points on Earth to the Internet. They will also interfere with astronomy.
Musk dismissed the criticism, perhaps because celestial objects tend not to be investors in Starlink, despite the name.
Enough Dunking
In a proper society, Elon Musk would be known as a brilliant and successful CEO and businessman. Musk would also be known as a philanthropist, maybe a little eccentric, a guy into science and futurism, and an all around decent guy and good boss (which he is reported to be). And I would just be evaluating whether to buy a new Tesla to replace my current, aging hybrid vehicle, or a more expensive but used Tesla model(2), instead of writing diaries about Tesla’s owner(3).
In a proper society, Musk or Bezos would never be allowed to accumulate such a fortune. As Annie Lowry stated in The Atlantic, every billionaire is a policy failure per se. And if Tech billionaires really want to help, the best way would be to just pay their taxes.
And in a proper society, we wouldn’t be looking to such vast inequality as a sign that the inequality winners have all the answers to our problems (including the answers to our infrastructure challenges), when in reality, these people just had the answer on how to get rich.
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(1) That’s less than 90% atmospheric pressure, or equal to the pressure normally seen at an elevation a little over 3000 ft above MSL.
(2) Seriously. I have a hybrid with just shy of 200,000 miles on it. I intend to hold on to it as long as I can, but I would like to consider a Tesla for my next vehicle when my hybrid dies. If anyone has any feedback on whether a Tesla makes a good second hand vehicle, I’d be happy to hear from you.
(3) Elon Musk gets picked on because, out of all the tech billionaires, he has the biggest presence on social media and is the most genuinely interested in attempting to solve humanity’s problems.