While Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria have hit Texas, the Gulf Coast, and Florida, we’ve been lucky in Virginia so far this hurricane season.
That wasn’t true last year at this time. Many people may remember how Hurricane Matthew hit the Hampton Roads area hard in October 2016. Though forecasters thought the storm would miss Virginia, it turned out that Matthew slammed into Virginia Beach and nearby cities with hurricane-force winds and up to ten inches of rain, leaving flooded streets and downed power lines. The storm left about 150,000 homes in Hampton Roads without power, and some homeowners had to wait weeks to get service restored.
All that is to say that Virginians should take storms preparation seriously, whether on the household level or in government. After all, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management has documented hundreds of hurricanes that have hit the Old Dominion going back to 1635.
And as we extend our thoughts and offer help to families displaced by the storms in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, we should also join the conversation about what we as a country should do in the future to make our communities more resilient and better prepared to recover from future storms.
According to the respected Rocky Mountain Institute, one of the best investments that communities can make to build resilience is to install more solar power coupled with battery storage.
Electricity is a key foundation of modern life every day of the year and no matter what the weather. But after a storm, when people need extra help, it’s even more critical than usual to have the power on, “allowing hospitals to run medical equipment, letting people charge phones and computers to communicate with the outside world, and powering lifesaving air conditioning for the elderly and infirm.”
Yet, electric power is one of the first services to feel the brunt of hurricane destruction. Hurricane Irma alone knocked out power for one in every 22 Americans, according to the Department of Homeland Security. More recently, Hurricane Maria knocked out 80% of power lines in Puerto Rico, leaving virtually every home and business without power. While power has been restored to some hospitals and emergency facilities, it could take up to six months to return service to the whole island.
Getting solar generators into place quickly can help restore power for critical services immediately, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute. And arranging to install solar + storage in places especially vulnerable to storms is good planning for the future.
As cities and utilities rebuild, there’s an option to look toward solutions that provide grid resilience, such as distributed energy, especially solar and battery storage sited on distribution grids. In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that states and countries that replace old, costly fossil-fired generators with renewables, efficiency, demand response, and other distributed energy resources (DERs) have found greater reliability and resilience at lower costs.
RMI offers three examples of communities that have installed solar + storage microgrids, basically, local offshoots of the national electricity grid that can function even when the bigger grid goes down:
- A microgrid with a three megawatt solar array plus storage in the town of Sterling, Massachusetts can keep the town’s police station and emergency dispatch center running for at least two weeks in the case of a power outage.
- On the other side of the country, when the transmission line feeding Borrego Springs, California, was damaged by lightning, San Diego Gas & Electric used the Borrego Springs 26 MW solar microgrid to power the entire community of 2,800—preventing what would have otherwise been a 10-hour power outage.
- When power was cut off for seven days to Ocracoke Island in North Carolina this past summer after a construction accident, a microgrid including 15 kilowatts of solar power and battery storage, helped provide power for island residents.
Virginia communities and organizations seeking backup power are just getting started installing solar + storage instead of traditional diesel generators. As a citizen of the Old Dominion, I hope you will support more local governments as well as hospitals, schools, fire and police along with other essential public services to consider going solar.
That could lead to quicker recoveries in the future while saving taxpayers money in the short run.
Meanwhile, homeowners who are interested in building their own resilience should consider getting solar + storage at home. While batteries are still expensive for most home applications, they have come down in cost enough to make storage worthwhile in certain situations such as homes in remote rural areas where the power goes out frequently.
If you’ve been considering solar + storage for a while and would like to know if it’s worthwhile at your place, just ask us for a free home solar assessment and price quote.
— Andrew Brenner, Main Street Solar
