Communities are thinking big and relying on smaller energy systems called microgrids to gain reliable energy autonomy.
(ED: You think you can’t afford solar panels, take a look at the picture and ask yourself if you think these building owners can afford them. Grants and debt financing worked for me.)
The Case for Microgrids
At its most basic, a microgrid is simply a hyperlocal power system: It includes a group of interconnected electricity users and the generation, storage and distribution resources to produce and deliver energy in a small area. Microgrids can operate in isolation from the larger grid when needed locally, and also provide energy to a region’s main grid—and reduce carbon emissions and costs—during normal operations.
Other communities that have benefited from microgrids during disasters include Babcock Ranch, a developer-planned town in Florida designed to be eco-friendly, with climate change resilience in mind. It withstood back-to-back battering from Hurricanes Helene and Milton thanks to its on-site solar farm, extensive stormwater control features and underground electricity distribution system. At Blue Lake Rancheria, a small Native American reservation in northern California, a solar and battery storage microgrid has helped the community avoid blackouts multiple times over the past seven years, such as during an active wildfire and a proactive multicounty power shutoff meant to prevent wildfires from igniting.
Microgrids aren’t cheap, though, and except for a few cases where grants support a project, customers end up bearing the extra burden in their monthly utility bill. Yet the alternative to paying for microgrids and other resilience solutions is often paying a steeper price for not having them. Outages make emergency response more costly, extensive and difficult. People are often unable to work, and things such as the cost of food spoilage can add up quickly. “If you consider all these externalities,” microgrids are often financially viable, says Dasun Perera, an energy system researcher at Princeton University.
In cost-benefit analyses that Perera has conducted in California, Chicago and Puerto Rico, microgrids are worth the price in all but a few cases—and they will only become more advantageous as the price of solar panels and batteries continues to decline.
(Editorial comment: The author fails to mention Virtual Power Plants that aggregate many microgrids, other DERs and massive numbers of loads by controlling thermostats. There is a lot of money to be made with VPPs. This means microgrids are not a cost, they are an investment that pays back the equivalent of a stock distribution each month as long as you participate in saving generation of greenhouse gases.)