EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
Alphabet and Tesla offer services for Puerto Rico hurricane recovery effort
Alphabet Inc. and Tesla Inc. are both planning to provide support services to assist the people of Puerto Rico in their recovery post-Hurricane Maria.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google LLC, has received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy a fleet of 30 Project Loon internet access balloons over both Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to provide emergency cellular service. According to reports, up to 90 percent of the island is without cellphone coverage, so the balloons will help provide a substitute to the thousands of cell phone towers knocked out by the storm.
The balloons will provide voice and data services through local carriers as opposed to any Alphabet/ Google service. They’ve received approval to operate for up to six months, presumably the estimated time it will take to restore local services fully.
Even as some infrastructure is restored in Puerto Rico, lack of power remains an ongoing problem in many places. Tesla founder Elon Musk is reported to have spoken with Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló on Friday about on offer to have Tesla rebuild the U.S. territory’s power grid.
“The Tesla team has [built solar grids] for many smaller islands around the world, but there is no scalability limit, so it can be done for Puerto Rico too,” Musk said on Twitter. “Such a decision would be in the hands of the PR govt, PUC, any commercial stakeholders and, most importantly, the people of PR.”
Tesla has previously rolled out battery/solar combinations in places such as Hawaii and American Somoa, but they’ve been on a small scale.
The company’s current deployment of battery backups in South Australia, described as the “world’s biggest battery,” is progressing. But the deployment is taking 100 days to supply backup storage of 100 megawatts, or enough to power 30,000 homes for 78 minutes each.
Puerto Rico, by comparison, has 1,376,531 homes, so how exactly Elon Musk is proposing to rebuild the entire island’s electricity infrastructure using solar and battery backup isn’t entirely clear. Even if the offer were accepted, it could take years, even over a decade, to be deployed using existing methods and supply chains.
Photo: Project Loon
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
