Eastern Puerto Rico, Barrio San Salvador, Caguas. DC Microgrid includes 90V direct drive circuit to power two cookers, two direct drive SunStar fridges (one running as a freezer and one as a fridge), and two 12V nickel iron battery kits, including custom built 12V lighting circuits.
El Departamento de la Comida (El Depa) was originally founded in 2010 as a restaurant and Puerto Rico’s first multi-farm CSA. In the aftermath of the devastating hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017, the organisation emerged as one of the most significant source of support for farmers on the island. They organised brigades of volunteers to help rebuild agricultural infrastructure that was destroyed in the storms. They adopted their name, which means “the food department,” as tongue in cheek jab at the government, which offers no support for local food production. In Puerto Rico, 85% of the food is imported, and food is very expensive. The situation is bad enough in good times, and during natural disasters, the lack of local food production becomes a matter of life and death.
In 2020, El Depa established a headquarters in San Salvador, in the mountains south of Caguas. Their space now includes a tool lending library, community seed exchange, educational resource centre, event space, and a processing kitchen. From this home base their staff organises an intergenerational exchange program, events, workshops, community meals, and more.
One of Depa’s mottos is “No hay soberanía alimentaria sin soberanía energética”: there is no food sovereignty without energy sovereignty. In the rural community of San Salvador, electrical service was down for over a year after the hurricanes. Even if farmers grew food, people went hungry if there was no energy to preserve food, cook, or keep food cold. To power their kitchen and help provide energy security for their community, the Depa team raised the funds to set up a conventional AC battery-based solar energy system at their headquarters. Within a few years it was clear that the system was not going to perform as promised, and the batteries were already starting to decline. They were back on the grid.
When the El Depa staff connected with us in 2022, they were thrilled to discover an energy model that was not based around batteries and resource extraction. They helped organise our first training. Tara, a co-founder of El Depa, attended the training. Tara was especially enthusiastic about our “Roxy Oven” cookers and wanted to get some established in Depa’s kitchen.
In February 2023, Debbie, Alexis and the kids traveled to Puerto Rico to build several Microgrids, including one for El Departamento de la Comida. We installed a high voltage direct drive system for two Roxy cookers, two direct drive refrigerators, and a 12V nickel iron battery kit for a charging station.
Later in 2023, Depa organised another immersion training at LEF. As a follow up to this, we decided to make better use of the batteries already installed at Depa by building a 12V lighting circuit. We could have switched out the fixtures they had, but the existing wiring in the walls was deemed to be unsafe for use with low voltage DC. 12VDC can build up more heat in the connections than AC, therefore weak connections can be hazardous. (Badly made electrical connections, like wires twisted together with no wire nut, are disturbingly common in PR.)
With the DC Microgrid at El Depa getting better every year, we decided that going forward it would make more sense to host the DC solar trainings at El Depa instead of at LEF. It will be easier for more Puerto Ricans to attend, and it will use less carbon to fly a handful of instructors to PR than to fly a dozen people to Virginia. And soon enough-given all the experience that the Depa team is getting doing installations- they won’t need us to teach at all!
