Going Off the Grid to Deal With Climate Disasters
Natural disasters are striking more often and with greater intensity. To keep their lights on, these communities are turning to independent supplies of renewable energy.
After the highly destructive hurricanes Helene and Milton tore through Southwest Florida in 2024, millions of residents spent days without the ability to run their air conditioners, refrigerators, cell phones, and lights. But not William Fulford. He stayed comfortably cool in his three-story home, eating home-cooked meals and watching TV with his wife and his sister, whose own nearby house had been damaged and darkened.
Fulford lives in Hunters Point, a planned 86-home community in the fishing town of Cortez. Each unit was built with a rooftop solar array, garage battery storage, and other specialized technology. Collectively, the homes generate more than 98 percent of their electricity and, crucially, continue working when the utility shuts down.
“In both these hurricanes, we never lost power—zero,” says Fulford, a retired custom-home builder. Electricity in the area was also cut several times this year during the construction of a bridge. “Every neighborhood around us was black, and we’re sitting here with the power on.”
Climate change is accelerating the number and intensity of natural disasters, all while energy grids are aging and becoming more vulnerable to weather-related disruptions. That’s why a growing array of homeowners, businesses, and cities are adopting their own power generation to withstand the aftermath of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other storms.
In recent years, so-called microgrids have proliferated in residential neighborhoods, universities, office buildings, Native American tribal lands, and, crucially, emergency facilities like hospitals and fire departments. Some power an entire community; others, a single building. A few localities have deployed temporary microgrids after a natural disaster.
(The link between extreme weather and climate change has never been more clear.)
“Microgrids upend the traditional notion that you need one centralized electricity-generation plant controlled by a utility. Instead, you can have communities controlling the generation themselves,” says Matt Abele, executive director of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, a nonprofit that has helped deploy microgrid projects in the state.
The U.S. has more than 5,000 microgrid projects in operation, according to the research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie—although they collectively generate less than one percent of the nation’s power. The majority have come online since 2019, with more than 600 such projects completed in the past few years, according to the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Several hundred more are in the planning stages.
Microgrids vary from traditional electrical grids in a few key ways.
Traditionally, electricity moves from a power plant to homes and businesses via a connected, centralized grid made of substations and transmission lines. A microgrid, by contrast, generates, stores, and consumes electricity in one relatively confined space. One of the most popular options are solar panels linked to on-site battery storage.
“The precipitous decline in the cost of solar and battery have made it especially attractive,” Abele says. In just over a decade, for example, prices for solar panels fell 70 percent per generated kilowatt-hour. Still, the five-figure cost to outfit each home is still too high for many who would benefit, Abele says.
In addition to generating most of their own power, many microgrids also connect to their local utility and draw power from that grid if they don’t produce enough on a given day. (If they generate more than they need, they can also sell back to the utility.) Some microgrid projects are completely self-contained, typically because they are in highly remote locations.
They’ve become particularly useful in the aftermath of natural disasters. A half-dozen schools in Salinas, California, use them to minimize electricity costs and keep classrooms running during blackouts, especially as the schools double as emergency shelters during wildfires and floods.
A fire station in Erie, Pennsylvania, and several in Brooklyn and Queens, New York, rely on them when the power goes out. And just hours after a medical center in New Orleans installed a microgrid in 2024, a blackout struck the area. Not being tethered to the city’s grid allowed doctors in the building to continue to provide medical care and keep temperature-sensitive medicines refrigerated.
The need for power in the face of storms and blackouts has always existed, “but what’s changed in recent years is that the renewable energy industry has gotten so much bigger and products much less expensive,” says Will Heegaard, CEO of Footprint Project, a nonprofit involved in national and international disaster relief and rebuilding.
New Orleans learned the hard way that a resilient grid is crucial for residents’ health and safety. Hurricane Ida directly caused or contributed to 19 deaths in 2021, many from excessive heat in the days after landfall when the heat index spiked over 100°F. State and local governments, local religious organizations, and nonprofits including Footprint Project came together to install several solar-powered microgrids around the city. This Community Lighthouse Project is currently working to eventually put 85 units on community buildings and churches city-wide, providing places during blackouts for residents to get food and medical care and to charge phones and laptops.
(What extreme heat does to the body.)
Some microgrids are portable so they can quickly power disaster-struck communities. Last fall some 300 luggage-sized solar microgrid kits were deployed to Jamaica when Hurricane Melissa struck, powering communication devices in the hard-hit mountain west. This allowed first responders to share crucial information about people and locations needing rescue and resources, Heegaard says.
Similar systems went to Hawaii after last spring’s floods. These not only powered command centers for responders but also enabled some rural residents to run lights, fans, and electric medical equipment in their homes.
Portable solar microgrids “produce no noise, fumes, or dangerous carbon monoxide,” Heegaard says, comparing them to the diesel generators traditionally used after disasters. “And, crucially, first-responders don’t have to keep sending people to wait on long lines at gas stations for the fuel,” he says.
Not all communities have been able to access the electrical safety net offered by microgrids.
The steep cost of large solar grids has especially stymied some Native American groups eager to deploy the technology across tribal lands, says Talia Martin, co-executive director of the nonprofit Tribal Energy Alternatives, which helps with funding and technical assistance.
Many tribes are in remote areas plagued with older equipment and transmission lines, making the grid unreliable. Even in beautiful weather, “they often experience outages and spend hours to days without power,” Martin says. “This is about social justice and energy sovereignty for tribes.”
Cost is a key reason why tribes seeking out microgrids are starting small. The Pueblo of Santa Ana tribe in New Mexico installed a system in their wellness center, and the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians in Corning, California, did so on a community center and administration building.
As solar costs continue dropping, experts expect more microgrids will be built, with investments projected to more than double by 2030. Solar, with batteries to store the power after the sun goes down, will likely remain the most dominate energy source, experts say.
Such projects will be especially important with energy demand in the U.S. projected to outstrip supply in the coming years.
Aside from their benefits during disasters, the microgrids also save customers money on their monthly utility bills. “We estimate annual savings for some homes to be $1,000 to $1,500 each year,” Martin says.
For communities and home developers that can afford the upfront cost, the long-term benefits of an independent supply of renewable energy are promising.
“Even on cloudy or stormy days, our system gathers enough sunlight to carry the house the whole day,” Fulford says of his Florida home. His only cost is a small service fee from the utility. “It's just so reliable and efficient, and cost-wise on our monthly bill, it’s been great.”
