Renewables are more reliable and offer more resiliency

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Wind and solar installations, while certainly not invulnerable, are less likely to be completely wiped out by extreme weather and can free people from reliance on a centralized source of power.

Solar panels and wind turbines are effectively mini power plants in themselves, distributed across the landscape and able to be disconnected from the central grid, meaning that they can continue to operate even when the main power supply goes down. With the help of battery storage, this can provide a life-saving source of power during critical outages.

Left: Jermaine Brisco outside his Lower 9th Ward home in New Orleans, which was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. In May 2006, the water in the area was still not safe to drink and electricity was mostly not functioning. Right: A row of hurricane-damaged homes with no power in the Lower 9th Ward on Feb. 20, 2006. Credit: Getty Images
Left: Jermaine Brisco outside his Lower 9th Ward home in New Orleans, which was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. In May 2006, the water in the area was still not safe to drink and electricity was mostly not functioning. Right: A row of hurricane-damaged homes with no power in the Lower 9th Ward on Feb. 20, 2006. Credit: Getty Images

It’s no wonder, then, that as Fukushima residents began to pick up the pieces of their lives in the aftermath of the disaster, many businesses and communities turned to renewables, particularly solar power. Jun Yamada was one such entrepreneur.

Yamada had been working in IT, but after the disaster, he teamed up with Yauemon Sato, another local man whose family had run a sake brewery in Fukushima prefecture for nine generations.

“We explored what we ourselves could do, as a small number of citizens living in the countryside,” said Yamada. “The conclusion was: Why don’t we generate renewable energy ourselves, and send it to the community?”

Together, they formed the Aizu Electric Power Company in 2013. To date, they have installed solar panels at 80 sites around the region.

Stories like this can be found throughout Japan’s disaster-hit areas, where new solar installations surged at rates that often far outstripped the pace of change in the rest of the country. For many, this was partly a psychological response to the disaster — a desire to build something safer and more resilient, over which they had more control.

The process was helped along by government policies — namely, the introduction of a feed-in tariff, which provides a high guaranteed price and grid access for renewable electricity, and easier access to land (acres of land became unusable for farming following the nuclear accident). But communities’ willingness to embrace change played an important role.

“A lot of these communities invested in public solar initiatives because they saw how vital it was to make it through the first 72 hours after a disaster,” said Timothy Fraser, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston who spent time with Japanese communities in 2016, tracking the transition to renewable energy in the wake of the tsunami.

“If a community can just make it through those three days, having power for vital facilities like hospitals and public shelters, by the end of that period, in most cases, disaster aid NGOs can get there and give support,” Fraser said.

Workers repair a pipeline from a Chevron Texaco facility on Sept. 11, 2005, after it was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Workers repair a pipeline from a Chevron Texaco facility on Sept. 11, 2005, after it was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Solar has proven itself critical to recovery from disasters around the world, but ideally, communities would have resilient energy systems in place before disaster hits.

For Blue Lake Rancheria, a small Native American tribal community in California, the value of a resilient, off-grid source of electricity was obvious.

“This area is very rural, and it’s also subject to wildfires, storms and floods. There have been outages in the region that have lasted a week, two weeks, or more,” said Jana Ganion, the tribe’s director of sustainability and government affairs. “The tribe knew that these were going to be amplified by climate change in some way — and of course, that has turned out to be exactly the case.”

In 2015, the tribe set up its own microgrid – including 1,500 solar panels – that can operate independently, effectively turning the reservation into a small energy island.

It turned out to be a lifesaving investment. When wildfires swept through Humboldt County in 2019, causing widespread power outages, the microgrid was able to supply power. Thousands of people from the surrounding area flocked to the reservation’s buildings. Several rooms of the tribally owned hotel were given over to eight critically ill patients who relied on power to supply them with constant oxygen. The county’s Department of Health and Human Services credited the tribe with saving their lives.


Sarita Turner believes that community-led renewables can be much more than a lifeline in a crisis; she sees them as an important tool in the fight against systemic racism and a way of achieving long-term stability for communities through jobs, education and empowerment.

As vice-president for U.S. programs at the Institute for Sustainable Communities, an international nonprofit based in Vermont, she works with community organizations in cities across the U.S. that use energy projects to build local resilience for climate-vulnerable communities of color.

One of these initiatives is Power52 in Baltimore. Founded in 2015, Power52 set out to reinject hope into a community that was hurting after Freddie Gray’s murder by police sparked city-wide protests and civil unrest. The nonprofit, which counts former NFL star Ray Lewis as one of its co-founders, trains people to install and maintain solar panels.

Previously unemployed graduates of Power52’s energy institute ― 65% of whom have spent time in jail ― installed solar panels and battery storage at an East Baltimore community center in 2018, turning it into a “resiliency hub” where people from some of the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods can gather during a blackout. The hub, which can provide 72 hours of electricity, is stocked with food and water, charging stations, and other things people need to ride out a crisis, big or small, in safety.

The POWER House is the first solar-powered, community-based resiliency hub in the nation. Graduates from the Power52 Energy Institute installed solar panels and a battery storage system so the community has power even when the grid fails. Credit: Power52 Foundation
The POWER House is the first solar-powered, community-based resiliency hub in the nation. Graduates from the Power52 Energy Institute installed solar panels and a battery storage system so the community has power even when the grid fails. Credit: Power52 Foundation

When disasters strike, like Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Harvey, communities of color are often hardest-hit, suffering greater property damage, loss of services like electricity and water, and long-term threats to their financial security. Preexisting vulnerabilities, like precarious employment, combined with unevenly distributed disaster relief, make it much harder for these communities to recover from a disaster.

Black residents of New Orleans were over three times more likely than their white counterparts to lose their jobs after Hurricane Katrina, for example. “Our work begins to undo that,” said Turner. “It begins to help people understand these connections and build resilience in their communities.”

The theory is that, by building capacity in Baltimore’s vulnerable communities to install and maintain clean energy systems, not only will they be better equipped to handle the immediate fallout from a climate-related disaster, but the project will build better long-term resilience, too, helping to break the cycles of poverty, unemployment and incarceration.

To date, Power52 has created four resiliency hubs in Baltimore and trained 209 solar engineers, providing job placement assistance for trainees. At a recent graduation, five of the eight trainees showed up with jobs in solar power already secured.

Alongside employment opportunities, “[c]ommunity renewables schemes can deliver a range of social and economic benefits to local communities,” found a report by the National Trust, a U.K. conservation nonprofit, including “increased autonomy, empowerment and resilience, opportunities for education, a strengthened sense of place, and an improved local economy.”

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“The evidence is clear, the jury is in, the predicted climate crisis is upon us.”

JANA GANION, BLUE LAKE RANCHERIA

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Junko Mochizuki, an expert in risk and resilience at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna who studied solar uptake in post-disaster Japan, observed something similar in Japanese communities where residents had joined together to build local solar projects on land that could no longer be farmed.

Rebuilding in this “more locally-oriented” way, she said, will make these communities “more resilient in the future: They have more community identity and they’re more invested.”


Most community energy projects take place on a small scale — a wind turbine here, a few solar panels there — generating enough power to supply local buildings or perhaps bring in a small stream of revenue.

But the challenge ahead is enormous. As populations rise and people get richer, global energy consumption is predicted to increase by nearly 50% by 2050.

Meeting this demand with fossil fuels would lead to an even greater climate catastrophe and leave communities even more vulnerable to its consequences. If humanity is to avoid that pathway, renewables must be scaled up.

Luckily, some countries have already started. Earlier this year, the World Bank partnered with the Kenyan government to finance off-grid solar projects across the country that will provide energy to 250,000 households and more than 800 public facilities. As well as weaning the country off fossil fuels, the partnership is helping light the homes of some of the 12 million people in the country who had no access to electricity and enabling children to learn remotely during a pandemic.

Left: A solar light is fitted onto a house near Nairobi, Kenya. Right: A family sits together under an LED bulb lit by a solar power generation kit in a rural area near Nairobi on Jan. 31, 2019. Credit: Getty Images
Left: A solar light is fitted onto a house near Nairobi, Kenya. Right: A family sits together under an LED bulb lit by a solar power generation kit in a rural area near Nairobi on Jan. 31, 2019. Credit: Getty Images

The conditions to pull off a large-scale solar shift are here: This year, solar power became the cheapest source of electricity in history. The International Energy Agency has dubbed it the “new king” of electricity, and predicts that solar and wind combined could overtake coal as the biggest source of the world’s power by 2025 ― if, and it’s a big “if,” national governments enact all the changes to their energy systems they are currently promising in order to tackle the climate crisis.

The Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami revealed the need for resilient energy systems. But in its scramble to power the country after the disaster, Japan demonstrated that a crisis is not a good catalyst for widespread, long-term change. While Fukushima prefecture is aiming to be 100% renewable-powered by 2040, Japan as a whole ― despite a new commitment last month to becoming carbon-neutral by 2050 ― has been moving in the wrong direction, shifting toward coal to make up the shortfall from its shuttered nuclear plants.

As Mochizuki puts it, after a catastrophe is “really not the time” to embark upon an ambitious reimagining of the energy system.

“We have spent more than enough time admiring the climate problem,” said Ganion, of Blue Lake Rancheria. “The evidence is clear, the jury is in, the predicted climate crisis is upon us.”

Her advice: “It’s time to fight.” The solutions are right in front of us and the transition is underway, she said, “but we must accelerate, starting today.”