Solar energy helped keep the lights on after Helene, but not how you might think

Oct 23, 2024

Buncombe County has invested over $10 million in the past few years to install solar panels in many of its municipal buildings and most of Asheville City Schools.

“We went from having zero solar projects to a whole bunch of solar projects in a real short order,” said Jeremiah LeRoy, Buncombe County sustainability officer.

Those projects mean the county will rely a lot less on energy derived from burning fossil fuels, the primary cause of climate change. The county also expects big cost savings.

A few days before Helene hit, LeRoy had another benefit in mind. He said these schools could one day make natural community hubs after a storm. They had all the right infrastructure: commercial kitchens, showers and plenty of space for people to congregate.

Helene knocked out power to more than 1 million people in North Carolina. Parts of Asheville didn't have power for over a week. Cell coverage remains spotty in some areas. This would have been the perfect time to tap into some free energy from the sun and power up a satellite hotspot.

There’s just one problem: Like most solar systems, none of Buncombe County’s has battery power, which you need to generate solar energy during a blackout.

“You might think that when you install solar that you have the ability to keep your lights on at any given time,” said Matt Abele, executive director of NC Sustainable Energy Association. “If you don’t have a battery to go with that, that might not be the case.”

Batteries store energy for later use instead of sending it to the grid. Interestingly, some electric vehicles can play the part of an at-home battery if the EVs are connected to the right hardware.

So, instead of systems installed in schools and county offices providing power through the blackout, portable solar systems became a lifeline, especially for rural mountain communities.

Two weeks after Helene hit, William Heegaard steered a loader around to the back of a semi-truck where he lifted a stack of small boxes from the back of a truck in Mars Hill, 30 minutes north of Asheville. The loader deposited the palette on the ground with a whack.

“We just finished unloading a palette of Luci Lights, which are these inflatable solar lanterns,” said Heegaard, the operations director for the nonprofit Footprint Project.

Footprint volunteers set up several sites in Buncombe County, including solar panels, batteries and satellite internet hotspots.

These renewable energy sources can provide a lot of power without much upkeep, but it can be a tough sell in busy times to emergency managers who aren’t accustomed to the technology. Instead, many counties after Helene relied on gas-fueled generators that require a reliable supply of diesel or propane. They’re also noisy.

Heegaard said many emergency managers redirected these resources to impromptu distribution centers run by local volunteers.

At a school in northeast Buncombe County, cars filed into the parking lot to receive supplies.

A foldout solar array powered a satellite internet hotspot. Cell service took almost a week to return to the area, but the school remained without power.

Volunteer Bronté Robinson said the hotspot has helped them coordinate supply drops with other distribution centers.

“We’re trying to not go to the same people with the same supplies five different times,” Robinson said.

Just down the road, Big Ivy Community Center is one of those hubs. Power had recently returned to the building, so, a Footprint Project volunteer was retrieving the nonprofit’s solar trailer.

The trailer houses a 50-kilowatt-hour battery bank, enough to power a home for a couple of days. Solar panels on the trailer’s roof charge the batteries while the sun’s out.

Sonia Smith lives just down the road. They sat near the trailer with their laptop out.

“I did the FEMA application, and I have a small farm,” Smith said. “So, my plan is just to get the USDA form and call them.”

These portable solar systems have made a big difference for rural mountain communities after Helene. But it still takes time for groups like Footprint to reach them, and they can only reach as far as road conditions permit.

As western North Carolina rebuilds, mountain communities will have to decide what resources they want on hand to generate power next time the lights go out.

Even as power returned to the majority of Asheville residents, some pockets remained without power well into the second week of recovery. Meadowood Mobile Home Park was one of those communities.

Footprint Project reached out to Brian Hollister, lead designer at Sundance Power Systems, to deploy a mobile microgrid. It’s a trailer with an angled solar panel roof. This portable array charges a 40-kilowatt-hour battery bank, which is more than enough to power a single home for a day. But Meadowood residents shared this well of energy across several homes.

“Anything that you would normally plug into your wall, they’re plugging in here,” said Hollister.

A spiderweb of orange and yellow cables ran from the trailer to homes throughout the neighborhood. Stored energy from the battery-bank-powered lights and small appliances.

Hollister deployed three other mobile power units in the area, including one near a fire department in Fairview, just outside of Asheville. These electric generators helped communities get by until power is restored.

In North Carolina, cities and counties are primarily installing solar panels to reduce their dependence on energy derived from fossil fuels — and to save money. You don’t need batteries for that. The goal hasn’t been to use solar as an emergency source of energy.

There are tax incentives and rebate programs geared toward installing solar systems, but those have generally not included incentives for battery storage. Duke Energy recently launched a pilot program aimed at making purchasing solar and battery systems more affordable for residential solar users.

Businesses and local governments have to weigh the cost of buying batteries against their not-insignificant cost. But, as global temperatures continue to rise, and these storms worsen, that cost-benefit analysis might change.

More people are combining solar with battery systems in places where hurricanes cause outages lasting months, like in the small town of Adjuntas in Puerto Rico. Like many towns in western North Carolina, Adjuntas is situated in the mountains with limited road access. José Esteban López Maldonado runs a farming school at his family farm there. Solar panels and a battery storage system power the whole farm, which isn’t connected to the grid.

The classrooms where Esteban teaches farm education courses served as a community center in 2017 after Hurricane María made many roads impassable. Another big incentive — is that even in good weather, he said, people can’t count on the grid to provide energy.

“In Puerto Rico, the electrical energy system is not reliable at all,” Esteban said. “It is always failing, and many people have decided to change to renewable energy such as solar panels.”

By making the farm self-sufficient, the people of Adjuntas have a reliable source of food, shelter and electricity after a storm. The rest of the town has similarly invested in solar and battery infrastructure. Areas starting to see more damaging storms due to climate change may be looking to places like Adjuntas for answers.

Spanish translated by Julian Berger, a member of WFAE’s Race & Equity reporting team.