Strengthening Puerto Rico’s Power Grid for a Resilient Future

ALBANY, N.Y. (Dec. 10, 2024) — Jorge González-Cruz, a Professor of Empire Innovation at the University at Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, is leading a project with a team of student researchers to reconstruct past major weather events in Puerto Rico and gather new data to help improve the island’s power grid resiliency.

The team traveled to Puerto Rico in October to install specialized sensors that can monitor Puerto Rico’s transmission towers when exposed to severe weather.

By reconstructing past storms, collecting new data on Puerto Rico’s transmission towers, and using machine learning algorithms, the researchers plan to develop new predictive modeling that can anticipate risks of disruption to the island’s power grid during extreme weather events.

The project is supported through funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The federal agencies awarded more than $7 million in grants this year to disaster resilience research projects across the nation.

González-Cruz plans to use the Puerto Rico work as a testbed for other island communities, along with vulnerable coastal areas in the U.S.