"Distributed solar and batteries are helping North Carolina communities that were cut off from grid power by flooding. Should utilities build them into resilience plans?"
"For years, Duke Energy has studied the threats that climate change poses to its power grid. It has produced tomes forecasting the risk to its power lines, substations, and power plants from fires, heat waves, and floods.
But the scope of Hurricane Helene’s devastation in the utility’s inland Carolinas territories — more than 350 substations disabled and a handful completely destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people still without power a week after the floodwaters receded — has blown its risk forecasts out of the water.
Now, as tens of thousands of utility workers from across the country struggle to rebuild swaths of Duke’s grid from the ground up, energy experts warn that it and other utilities must start to consider alternatives to the century-old paradigm of utility poles, wires, and substations — like distributed power and microgrids.
Solar panels and batteries can power homes, businesses, churches, schools, and sometimes entire towns. These clean, distributed energy systems can reduce or replace the need for fossil-fueled backup generators during emergencies. They can also provide clean energy to the grid under normal conditions, helping to lower reliance on the fossil-fueled power plants responsible for climate change."
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