I hope I'm not being naive about this (as corporations often have a way of making you regret your words), but this is the way - find a need, make it happen, get it done. I am really glad Tesla et al are doing this. They are having a direct impact and they may even reap some nice rewards themselves down the line, even if that wasn't the biggest driver.
I wonder if they could look into outcome-based contracting [1] for these projects, should the discussion of paying ever arise. Seems like it might be a good fit.
I think this is a social responsibility regardless, although some people prefer to do good work either anonymously or behind the camera. Either way is fine.
If you see the adoption of sustainable technology as a social good, then it would be a missed opportunity to not publicize this event. It's a great advert for solar power and battery storage.
One problem with Solar I hadn't really thought about is how robust they are (not) in storms. The picture at the top of this article shows how a grid on Peurto Rico was destroyed.
I too am curious how this is superior to electrical lines in a storm. The best I could come up was that the grid is now more distributed such that storms could take out some but not all systems. I suspect getting certain critical assets back online would necessarily be easier since additional nodes aren't necessary to interlink power from a central system. Can anyone provide other benefits?
There's an element of intrinsic redundancy. Most solar panels can withstand considerable impact damage with only a modest loss of efficiency. The loss of a panel doesn't knock out the whole array. On a community level, losing power in some fraction of your buildings is much less disastrous than being knocked off the grid.
The amount of Elon Musk hate I see online is crazy. It seems like people are hellbent on hating this guy. When he announced that Tesla could help Puerto Rico, the number of snarky and demeaning comments was huge. Now, so quickly, they've actually accomplished something good. I wonder if any of those snarky people, most of which probably did nothing to help Puerto Rico, will care.
All I can say is I saw this headline and breathed a sigh of relief. I haven't heard anything good coming out of PR at all.
For what it's worth, while I like the idea of solar power as the revival of PR's power grid, I would not be breathing such a sigh of relief if the feds had helicoptered in with the kind of energy they reserve for invading countries and restored power and set up relief for villages far from the port.
>The amount of Elon Musk hate I see online is crazy.
It's called envy. They think they are saying something about Elon Musk but in reality they are telling what kind of monsters they themselves are.
In Dutch we have an expression: The inn keeper is as the inn keeper trusts his guests. As in: good people assume good intentions. Bad people assume bad intentions. Those who trust are trustworthy, those who do not are not.
Tesla's image of the project's solar array, in a parking lot next to the hospital, has been liked more than 84,000 times since it was posted to Instagram Tuesday.
Beyond donating the panels? Other people are free to donate goods and services to help Puerto Rico recover, I will do my part to ensure they're recognized regardless of partisan affiliation.
If you're comparing this to paid social media advertising, the hospital is not an analogy for kim kardashian. Tesla's efforts are what generated the attention, not the hospital itself that Tesla is piggy backing
