After being ravaged by both Hurricane Irma and Maria, Puerto Rico is desperate to rebuild damaged infrastructure and return a sense of normalcy to the people of the island. Luckily for them, there may be a way to drastically speed up that process and improve the technology involved at the same time.?
In a casual conversation on Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was asked whether his company would be capable of going into the storm-ravaged territory and rebuilding their power grid using solar technology. Remember, Tesla just recently absorbed one of Musk¡¯s other companies, SolarCity, which deals in both small and large-scale solar power generation, as well as the technology to store that energy.
In his reply, Musk claimed that the company has in fact done just that for ¡°many smaller islands around the world¡±, and there is ¡°no scalability limit¡±, so they could in fact get to work Puerto Rico if that¡¯s what the local government wanted. In response, Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Rossello simply said, ¡°Let¡¯s talk.¡±
Musk has been known to offhandedly or even jokingly propose major projects on Twitter, only to surprise everyone by eventually getting to work on them in all seriousness. That¡¯s how the Boring Company got started, after everyone assumed it was a standard ¡°I hate traffic¡± rant on Twitter. And that seems to be the case here too. It seems the two actually did get down to have a chat, though whether an endeavour will finally emerge from the conversation is anyone¡¯s guess.