The Blue Planet Alliance will host leaders and stakeholders from different islands around the world next week to discuss energy resilience.
Ruth Santiago, an environmental lawyer based in Salinas, Puerto Rico, said she plans to attend the seminar, where she hopes to learn how other island nations and communities are equipping their energy infrastructure to withstand disasters.
Puerto Rico is still recovering from an extreme hurricane season in 2017, which significantly damaged the electrical grid.
"There was a total power outage, with the whole centralized grid going down for months, and in some cases, even close to a year," Santiago said.
Now, Santiago said there is close to $20 billion available in federal investments for Puerto Rico to transform its grid.
"This sort of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invest in the transformation of the electric system," Santiago said.
She doesn't want officials to simply rebuild the previous centralized grid system that was reliant on fossil fuels.
Instead, Santiago is interested in how Puerto Rico and other island states can leverage certain resources, like an abundance of solar power, to overcome shared challenges such as limited land area for constructing new energy projects.
Ultimately, she hopes that island communities can have the chance to chart their own energy futures.
"Our islands need not be a places of unmitigated disaster," Santiago said. "There are many local solutions and proposals that can be put into place."
