Texas company slowing Puerto Rico’s path to solar and energy resilience after Hurricane Maria

SAN JUAN: After Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico’s power grid and plunged the island into 11 months of darkness, local leaders and activists vowed to start shifting the Caribbean island toward distributed renewable sources, like solar power, and energy independence.

But the Texas-based company that owns the lion’s share of the residential solar market in Puerto Rico has been plagued by hundreds of complaints — ranging from misleading clients to not delivering on cheaper electric bills — and accused of running a virtual solar monopoly that could hamper the island’s transformation of its energy sector.

Earlier this month, the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, an oversight agency, released a scathing report against Sunnova Energy Corp., confirming clients’ complaints and directing the Houston-based company to fully disclose information on the services it offers customers. The bureau said 436 customers filed complaints against the company.

Complaints include:

• Customers thought they were agreeing to a credit check but instead had signed up for a 25-year contract with Sunnova.
• Sunnova misled customers on potential savings with their solar panels.
• Sunnova didn’t fully reveal costs of solar panel financing to customers.

“Sunnova’s practices during the contracting process are not consistent with the obligations that power companies have under” Puerto Rican law, the report said.

Sunnova, which has 20 days to reply to the report, denies the allegations and is preparing a detailed rebuttal to the Energy Bureau’s claims.

“Sunnova strongly disagrees with the allegations in the recent PREB report,” the company said in a statement. “We take these matters very seriously and are committed to working in good faith to resolve any and all valid issues.”

A joint investigation by the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico and USA TODAY found wide-ranging cases across the island where clients felt they were misled on their solar panel systems and entered costly arrangements they couldn’t afford. Another widespread complaint: Their solar panels didn’t work after Hurricane Maria.

Sunnova leases their solar panels to customers and uses local contractors to install them.

Madeline Batista, of Naguabo, in the southeast part of the island, said she signed a contract with Sunnova in 2014 to buy solar energy and rent 16 photovoltaic panels. Her bill, just for the panels, was $98 per month for 25 years, with an additional payment of around $60 a month to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA. Her monthly electric bill has not gone down, she said, even though per power consumption has remained the same.

“If I can get out of this contract, it would be wonderful,” she said.

Batista left Puerto Rico in Hurricane Maria’s aftermath to live with a son in North Carolina, but her husband, Rafael Rivera, stayed behind to continue paying for the solar panels, she said.

“That contract was very abusive,” she said.

Puerto Rico’s electrical system has been in a state of disrepair for decades and controlled by PREPA, a public corporation which controls energy generation and distribution on the island. It is in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings in federal court.

Sunnova, which has 65,000 solar customers in the U.S. and its territories, began selling solar panels in Puerto Rico in 2013 as an attractive alternative to costly PREPA services. The company quickly became the island’s solar leader. Today, it has around 10,000 residential solar customers in Puerto Rico — or more than 90 percent of the total residential solar market on the island.

Complaints against Sunnova quickly started piling up at the Independent Office of Consumer Protection, known by its Spanish acronym of OIPC, a consumer advocacy agency that monitors energy companies. The complaints were mainly related to lack of savings promised by Sunnova, according to José Pérez Vélez, former OPIC director. By 2017, OPIC had registered more than 1,000 complaints related to Sunnova systems.

Then, on Sept. 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria blasted onto the island and rendered the power grid — and many Sunnova panels — useless for nearly a year. Maria’s powerful gusts impacted at least 80 percent of the transmission and distribution systems, according to PREPA. The vast majority of residential solar systems done by Sunnova are grid-connected and lack batteries for energy storage. When the grid goes down, so do the solar systems.

The lack of power on the island was a crippling challenge for Puerto Ricans recovering from Maria and was attributed to many of the estimated 2,975 deaths from the storm, as sick residents went without ventilators or dialysis machines.

Source: usatoday