Authored by Bret Biggart
You know all about Hurricane Beryl and the devastation it wrought in the Houston area last month.
You know about CenterPoint Energy’s inability to restore power quickly, the dozens of people who died, the costs that customers will be paying off for a generation, and the corporate investments that cost hundreds of millions of dollars but failed to keep the lights on.
You probably aren’t surprised to know that CenterPoint had been judged among the least reliable utility companies in the nation even before Beryl, and other similarly big utilities such as Florida Power & Light aren’t far behind.
And you know about Hurricane Debby just weeks later, the flooding it just inflicted on North Carolina and the Southeast, and the clear signs that more bad storms are coming.
But here’s some good news that maybe you haven’t heard: it’s about a place called Babcock Ranch, a Florida community about 20 miles from the Gulf Coast that runs on solar power and battery storage.
It’s also known, across the country and around the world, as Florida’s first hurricane-proof town.
Two years ago, Hurricane Ian, a near-Category 5 hurricane, hit that part of Florida hard, and record-breaking storm surge and 100-plus mile-per-hour winds smashed Ft. Myers a few miles away. But Babcock Ranch never even lost power. The community and its residents generate their own electricity and store it for when they need it. They don’t face the same kind of danger when extreme weather starts downing power lines or straining the power grid.
That is the promise that solar and storage systems offer to every homeowner. At Freedom Solar, delivering on that promise is one of the most rewarding parts of our mission.
In the Houston area alone, we’ve seen demand for solar systems and backup batteries jump 500% since Beryl. These systems deliver power for the people, even in the most extreme circumstances — we’re fired up, every single day, to help make that happen.
And the systems do more than keep people safe from blackouts — they also keep them free from high bills. That’s especially true in the summer, when the same sunlight that cranks up the afternoon heat also hits your solar panels to power your air conditioner and cool down your house.
As power prices rise, those cost savings get more and more important. A recent report by Ohm Analytics shows that across the country, electricity rates have increased by 5% in the past year — and that’s before utilities start spending trillions of dollars to replace aging grid infrastructure over the next 20 years.
Solar and storage protect people from those grid issues.
They also flip the script on utilities like CenterPoint. When solar panels are generating more electricity than a home uses, that excess can often be sold back to the utility. That’s especially true during extreme summer heat waves; just look at this power bill that one of our Houston, Texas customers got last August — a brutally hot month here:
You’re reading that right: his electric utility paid him more than $400 for the electricity he put on the grid. He also had power throughout the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl last month, even as neighbors suffered outages.
It’s a very, very sad reality that weather will keep getting more extreme, and energy prices are going to go up — these crises keep happening, and there’s every reason to think they’ll continue to happen.
The world is moving to solar and storage because it has to. It’s the difference between surviving the future and thriving in it. The energy transition is a revolution, and especially after the events of the last few weeks, it’s an honor to be a part of it.