RICARDO ARDUENGO via Getty Images Lights powered by a generator hang over a street in Vieques on Nov. 26, 2017, two months after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico.

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico ― It looks like something out of a brochure advertising what renewable energy could offer a remote, storm-ravaged island. Electrical lines still hang perilously from poles across the street, but inside the mint-green, one-story Ciudad Dorada senior center, fans blow cool air and refrigerators stocked with insulin and other medicines run cold even as the noon sun broils in a cloudless Caribbean sky. On its roof are a set of Tesla photovoltaic solar panels, attached via cable to a pair of Tesla batteries hitched to the wall beneath. And yet, a diesel generator growls on full blast behind the center. Workers from Tesla, billionaire Elon Musk’s electric car and solar energy giant, arrived on Vieques just weeks after hurricanes Irma and María crippled the aging electrical grid and severed the transmission cable that connected this island to the Puerto Rico mainland seven miles west. The company selected the senior center as one of 11 sites on the darkened island that it would equip with power-producing panels and batteries. Constructing the system was simple. But when workers attached the panels and batteries to the old electrical wiring in the former schoolhouse, the batteries blew out. “It doesn’t work,” a nurse at the senior center said in Spanish during a HuffPost visit in late February. “It never has.” The circuitry issue proved ominous. Officials promised that Tesla’s effort heralded a brighter future on Vieques, one that would free the island from dependence on fossil fuels and make it a model for the rest of Puerto Rico. But apparent supply shortages, regulatory hurdles and a lack of long-term planning dashed those hopes. Today the island still depends on dirty power from the mainland, and some solar panels and batteries sit useless and broken with another hurricane season less than a month away. “We’re back to square one,” said Edgar Oscar Ruiz, 34, a local activist pushing for renewable energy on Vieques. “Tesla came in with great intentions, but that’s not enough.” Vieques’ experience shows what renewable energy experts say are the risks of relying on corporate goodwill to deliver transformative change and highlights the potential hurdles that Puerto Rico now faces as it seeks to convert the territory’s entire electricity system to renewable energy and sell off parts of its public utility. “There’s a cautionary tale here,” said Andrea Luecke, president of the Solar Foundation, an industry nonprofit. A Sunny Proposal Tesla staffers arrived in Puerto Rico a week after Hurricane María made landfall on Sept. 20, 2017, and before many relief workers. By November, the company sent an unsolicited proposal to the Puerto Rican government. The pitch included building solar power microgrids ― which would produce and distribute power autonomous of the territory’s main electrical grid ― on Vieques and Culebra, its smaller, more touristy neighbor. The content of the proposal, though never made public, is confirmed in a study released by the Puerto Rican government. Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló touted the effort in December 2017. “These projects are part of the measures we are taking to build a better Puerto Rico after the passage of Hurricane María and ensure a reliable service for the benefit of the citizens who reside here,” Rosselló told Radio Isla 1320 back then. Around the same time, Tesla contacted the municipal government on Vieques to begin talks about buying public land on which to build a microgrid, according to Carlos Jirau, a development consultant working for the mayor. “Tesla was asking for the possibility to acquire land from the municipality to develop a microgrid,” Jirau said. He said he requested a formal proposal but never heard back. It’s easy to understand the opportunity Tesla saw. In 2016, the company had converted the entire electrical supply of Ta’u, a 600-resident island in American Samoa, to solar power and batteries. A year later, Tesla built a massive solar and battery farm on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Vieques represented not only another test case for its technology but a chance to do some good. The island ― dubbed “the colony of the colony” by some locals because of its history of human and environmental exploitation ― was languishing in what would become the second-longest blackout in world history.

ASSOCIATED PRESS Elon Musk's company Tesla proposed the building of solar power microgrids on the Puerto Rican islands of Vieques and Culebra.

Tesla worked quickly. It installed equipment at the Susana Centeno Hospital, the island’s lone medical center. It deployed units to Ciudad Dorada, the Boys and Girls Club of Vieques, an elderly daycare center, two water supply plants, a sewage treatment facility and three private homes occupied by elderly, single women. “We’re just trying to be as helpful as we can in Puerto Rico,” a Tesla spokesman told HuffPost. “We had employees on the ground working to restore power as soon as the hurricane cleared, and we still have full-time employees there to this day. We’re committed to our efforts to expand clean energy there, including the large number of current and planned solar and storage installations across the island.” For the most part, those targeted efforts to restore power after the storm succeeded. The company convinced many on the island of solar energy’s potential and several other sites are now also installing panels, according to Mark Martin, a coordinator with the nonprofit Vieques Love who worked with Tesla. “Vieques was abandoned,” Martin said, so the speed with which Tesla got electricity flowing again left an impression. “It was a culture change,” he said. “On the island, you can see a turn in the thinking.” But larger permanent changes to infrastructure were limited. At one water treatment facility, the battery sat dormant and, during HuffPost’s visit to the site in late February, the field of solar panels was overgrown with weeds and brush. Several panels bore the shattered imprints of horse hooves, a predictable problem on an island with one wild horse for every two humans. The hospital ― damaged and mold-infested from the storm ― was permanently shuttered. After they helped to power a makeshift medical center, Tesla moved those solar panels, along with other equipment, to some of the 11,000 other sites it started work on across Puerto Rico. Tesla didn’t boast about its Vieques projects specifically, and it wasn’t the only company to send equipment to the island; San Francisco-based Sunrun also deployed units after the storm. But Tesla’s efforts earned the most praise in media outlets including Fortune and Inc., in no small part due to Musk’s celebrity and his high-profile, if at times bizarre and calamitous, disaster relief efforts in other places. One popular clean-tech blog cited Vieques when it bellowed, “Musk’s Philanthropy Deserves Headlines.” If Tesla had planned to lay the groundwork for an island-wide microgrid, existing regulations created an obstacle. On the territorial level, the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority enjoyed a monopoly on power generation and distribution. Years of neglect and billions in debt left the power grid that PREPA oversaw fragile and unprepared to integrate new technologies. On the national level, the Federal Emergency Management Agency largely limits its funding aid for post-hurricane repairs to projects that restored existing infrastructure ― which made novel improvements, such as solar power microgrids, difficult to finance with public money. The federal funding has also been fodder for a fight in Washington as President Donald Trump has raged against Puerto Rico, accusing its officials of mishandling relief money, and Democrats argue that a White House blinded by racism has left millions of American citizens to suffer. Regulatory changes in Puerto Rico over the past year, however, promise to make it simpler to build renewable energy in the future. Last May, territorial regulators finalized rules easing the way for microgrids, though PREPA’s bankruptcy still complicates the process. In December, Rosselló signed a bill legalizing locally owned energy cooperatives. In March, the Puerto Rican legislature approved a bill mandating that 100% of the island’s electricity will be generated from renewable sources by 2050. “This policy provides a pathway, a very robust pathway, for solar and batteries,” Rosselló told HuffPost in an interview last month, noting that the island had issued a request for proposals of new projects. “Companies like Tesla, Sunrun and others will be able to bid for that.” The Puerto Rican government wants Vieques to be the test case for microgrids, Omar Marrero, director of the territory’s Public-Private Partnership Authority, told Quartz in an interview published in May. “Whatever the generation [source], we all agree on microgrids,” he said. ‘A Solar Graveyard’ But agreeing on microgrids is just a first step. Puerto Rico produced just 2% of its power from renewables before the hurricanes, despite an existing law that required 12%, InsideClimate News reported. The new legislation’s ambitious benchmarks ― 20% by 2022 and 40% by 2025 ― seem at odds with PREPA’s plans to build out natural gas import terminals, pipelines and power generators. It’s not enough either to build the solar panel and battery farms. They have to be maintained. The busted solar panels at the facility on Vieques’ northern shore is a textbook case of what Jenean Smith, an executive at the California-based nonprofit solar installer Grid Alternatives, calls a “solar graveyard.” The term refers to the phenomenon of companies or nonprofits bringing photovoltaic panels and batteries to underdeveloped economies and then leaving them to fall into disrepair as the locals administering the systems struggle to maintain them.

Alexander C. Kaufman/HuffPost A shattered Tesla solar panel outside a water facility.

“We see it with off-grid systems all around the world, where well-intentioned organizations will install systems, get a lot of PR, get funding upfront, then they leave,” Smith said by phone. “And there’s a disconnect between the PR and the reality on the ground.” The best way to avoid this, Smith said, is for companies or foundations that fund these projects to put aside extra money to hire and train maintenance staff. “We proactively visit all of the systems we’ve installed and we make sure we check in with people,” she said. “You have to build in a budget a project management system ― not just for when it’s installed but for the next five, 10, 15 years.” The new rules allowing energy co-ops offer some hope. The model retains the public ownership that opponents of PREPA’s privatization want but empowers the community benefiting from the project to help maintain the operation, according to Nelson Colón, chief executive of the Puerto Rico Community Foundation, a nonprofit that is building solar co-ops in the territory. “There is a challenge when a private commercial entity comes and deploys solar panels and batteries ― then the community is not engaged, the community is not part of it,” Colón said by phone. “In our model, the community is a very active participant.” The foundation is raising money for a fund to build a “Green Corridor” of co-op projects from Culebra through Vieques, all the way to the western tip of the main island. That local-ownership model offers fewer openings for private companies to shake down ratepayers. It also sets a standard for long-term contracts that factor in system maintenance. “There’s a tendency of companies wanting to rush in and fix things and be as reactive as possible,” Luecke said. “That tendency is wrong.” For Tesla, reacting to public need in select places has paid dividends, at least in terms of good press. The projects in Ta’u and Kauai generated adulatory coverage. Last July, the firm said it would do the same for the entire island nation of Samoa. In January, Tesla set its sights on Greece’s backyard of islands.

Bloomberg via Getty Images A sign for handicap parking stands at a tilt outside the closed Susana Centeno Hospital on Jan. 25.