Bad Bunny Highlighted Puerto Rico’s Energy Crisis. This Stanford Duo is Doing Something About it

Raya Power co-founders Meghan Wood and Nicole Gonzalez want to make solar power as accessible as buying and installing a fridge.

BY MARÍA JOSÉ GUTIERREZ CHAVEZ, EDITORIAL FELLOW

Raya Power co-founders Meghan Wood and Nicole Gonzalez. Photos: Courtesy company

For some of the 128 million people watching the Super Bowl halftime show, Bad Bunny dancing atop utility poles might have seemed like just a strange scenography choice. But for most, if not all, Puerto Ricans, it was a stark reminder of what living on an island at the mercy of its crumbling power grid looks like—constant lights out.  

At least, that was the case for electrical engineer Nicole González, 32, who grew up on the East Coast, spending summers with her family in Puerto Rico. While she was working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Mars Rover team in 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, cutting off communication between her and her family on the island.

“I found myself asking, ‘how is it possible that the technology exists to have power over on Mars and we can’t keep the lights on for people?’,” she told Inc. It wasn’t surprising the lights were out for her family, with power outages being commonplace following storms. But Maria was different.

“It was silent, and that silence lasted for two weeks,” González says. “I’d come home from work and I would turn on the radio, and that would be the rest of my evening— just listening in to see if there’s any report from the towns that my family is from.”

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Weeks into the silence, González’s paternal uncle, who lived in the southern coast of Puerto Rico, trekked all the way to San Juan, where he finally got cell service and called her, notifying her and her parents that all family members had survived the storm and its aftermath.

“All of my family was grouped together at my grandparents house because they had a generator,” she says. “They all lived there for one or two months within that house, and that’s where everything operated, and everybody else lived without power.”

As did the rest of the island. The 2017 storm knocked down 80 percent of the island’s transmission and distribution lines, plunging the island into the worst blackout in US history. The grid took over 11 months to restore, and the island has still not fully recovered— rolling blackouts remain common, rendering access to electricity-dependent essentials like electricity like refrigeration or medical devices unreliable.

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