By Bret Biggart
Way back in July, Hurricane Beryl hit Houston. The storm upended the local power grid and left millions without lights or air conditioners — many of them for days — in the heat of the Texas summer.
Last month, Hurricane Helene rolled through the southeast and mid-Atlantic, triggering devastating, deadly floods that communities across the region, especially in North Carolina, are still recovering from.
And this month, Hurricane Milton intensified in a historically short period of time and then slammed into Florida, further damaging and knocking out power in the hard-hit state.
This year’s brutal hurricane season, its summer heatwaves, and the deep freezes we’ve seen in recent winters all offer a painful reminder of the threats we face from extreme weather. Seeing damage from the disasters especially, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.
At the same time, even as we respond to ongoing emergencies, everyone — from governments to employers to individuals and families — needs to prepare for what we know is coming. Fortunately, solar and storage units are more than proving their worth through both catastrophes and extreme temperatures.
Consider a Florida subdivision called Hunters Point:
The community near Sarasota Bay was hit hard by Helene — and even harder by Milton. Yet its homes and structures also were built to withstand a hurricane. Besides reinforcing buildings, burying power lines, and using innovative solutions to problems like drainage, the neighborhood runs on solar and storage.
During normal times, that means Hunters Point residents pay nothing for electricity or even make money selling power back to the grid.
In a hurricane, we now know, it means their homes are protected from blackouts. The neighborhood suffered no significant damage during the storms, especially compared with the devastation surrounding it. One Hunters Point couple even weathered Hurricane Milton without leaving their home.
Now, just to be clear, if the authorities call for an evacuation, go! But this anecdote is a powerful demonstration of the difference it makes when homeowners can generate and store their own energy.
In our case, just after Hurricane Beryl, Freedom Solar Power saw a fivefold increase in demand for solar and battery systems. And this story vividly demonstrates the difference
that solar power, battery storage, and microgrids could have made in protecting
Carolinians from Hurricane Helene.
Of course, hurricanes are an extreme example. But even quieter moments this summer showed again what a difference solar and storage make.
In most of the country, it was sweltering. Places like Texas may have felt a little cooler — especially after the record-breaking summers of 2022 and 2023 — but 2024 was still one of the hottest on record across the state.
Luckily, most of us avoided grid-scale outages. But the heat still caused successions of smaller outages that affected thousands or tens of thousands of people.
Solar and storage help people survive those interruptions — keeping their lights on and A/Cs running even when they’re going out across the neighborhood.
They also cut down on bills year-round: as this University of Texas study notes, solar systems alone save about 40% of a neighborhood’s power costs. Our own customers’ experience shows that solar and storage systems save people about $27,000 in utility costs, on average, over the lifetime of the systems.
That’s how solar and storage help keep people free and safe from high bills and blackouts. It is, truly, power for the people.
Please call us if you want to know more about it. More than that, treat this summer and hurricane season as a warning — and a sign of things to come.
Not only will solar and storage protect your energy bill, but it could protect something even more important – you and your family.