When Hurricane Helene barreled through the southeastern U.S. last September, triggering severe flooding in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, among other inland areas, the category 4 storm left an indelible impression. That’s because the regions hit hardest were once considered “climate havens,” or points of refuge where Americans could move to escape the ravages of climate change. This of course is a fallacy, in part because the notion of climate safe havens was conjured by real estate professionals.

There are no climate havens. Full stop. And while more long-term remediation efforts remain technically within reach, to say nothing of our need to stop burning fossil fuels to produce energy, we are also obliged to focus on the short term.

That short term, by which I mean the next 1 to 10 years, is critical. Within that approximate time frame, homeowners living in vulnerable areas (that’s every homeowner) would be well advised to initiate various resiliency measures for their homes, namely, more electrification, more solar, and more energy storage.

According to Spencer Fields, director of insights at EnergySage, in the wake of Helene “more homeowners in impacted or at-risk areas are seeking out solar and storage to bolster their home resilience. Communities are turning to home electrification as a way to enhance their energy security and reliability against future disruptions.”

Additionally, given that we are bearing witness to one of the most catastrophic years for climate disasters—and the first year to exceed the Paris Agreement 1.5°C threshold—we would also do well to realize that nearly every local climate event has global implications.

Helene’s impacts on the solar industry

Just up the road from Asheville, about 35 miles northeast, as the crow flies, is the small town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Much has been written about Spruce Pine’s importance as a key (and rare) geological source of high-purity quartz, a critical component used in the manufacturing of semiconductors and silicon ingots for solar panels. Helene dumped more than two feet of rain on Spruce Pine, bringing floods that washed out roadways, devastated local businesses, and forced the town’s two mining facilities to temporarily shut down.

One solar industry expert assessed that if the mines remained closed for “more than a few weeks,” it would have devastating impacts on global supply chains. Fortunately, the largest of the town’s two quartz mines, operated by Belgium conglomerate Sibelco, resumed operations in early October.

All things considered, this was a near miss. But the acute impacts of Helene on the larger inland region of southern Appalachia cannot be overlooked. As of November 12, some seven weeks after the storm, Asheville is still without clean drinking water, and road repair crews throughout the area have years of work ahead of them. The storm also brought to light the North Carolina legislature’s recent record of repeatedly rejecting various measures that could have hardened homes against flooding, high winds, landslides, and other extreme weather events, effectively weakening the state’s building standards as well as lawmakers’ ability to adopt better building codes as needed. This combined reality has left many homeowners to ponder what their future holds.

“This was one of the first times we’ve seen such large destruction in one of the areas [we serve],” says Hannah Elliott, senior director of operations at Renu Energy Solutions, a solar contractor with offices in Asheville, Charlotte, and Columbia, South Carolina. Of the estimated 200 customers Renu Energy serves in the Asheville area, Elliott says about 50% have backup battery storage.

“In the last month or so we have seen a massive influx of existing customers, and new customers from other installers that have gone out of business, wanting to add batteries to their systems,” Elliott explains. She attributes this response to people’s desire to “fortify their ability to be energy independent and save money,” as well as the growing acceptance that having a more resilient home is advisable regardless of geography.

Stabilizing the grid

The resiliency factor resonates with Elliott. She clearly wants people to have some form of backup power for their homes, but above all, she wants to get new customers “on some type of [solar] solution as quickly as possible.” Considering the current state of the grid coupled with more frequent (and devastating) climate events, her sense of urgency is understandable. And it is not unfounded.

Solar adoption on the part of homeowners has been ticking up steadily in the state for the last three years. According to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association, North Carolina ranks fourth in the nation for the amount of solar installed in 2024. Current estimates place the state’s solar capacity at 10 gigawatts. This much services 9% of the state’s electricity needs, spread throughout 1.2 million homes, and supports more than 7000 jobs. But without adequate storage, hundreds of thousands of standalone PV arrays won’t do much good when the grid goes down for days or weeks on end.

If the grid is unstable or simply non-functioning for sustained periods, then those home systems “need to be treated differently,” says Mike Sherman, Renu Energy’s marketing director. “In the event of long-term outages, we’ve got to make sure that our customers understand how their systems behave, particularly when solar and storage are involved, and how those systems can be managed over the long term.”

Fortunately, even though the state’s lawmakers failed to heed the warning signs when it came to building codes, North Carolina’s Utilities Commission has been more receptive to calls for positive change. Duke Energy, the state’s largest utility company, offers a comparatively generous incentive package—up to $9000 in rebates—for 6000 residential customers to install solar with a battery backup system. This is part of a larger pilot program called PowerPair that Duke launched, with the Commission’s blessing, in early 2024.

The purpose of the PowerPair program is to provide Duke with critical data regarding usage rates and system performance, which will be leveraged to eventually launch a full-scale virtual power plant (VPP). “Solar can’t scale by itself, and energy storage can unlock far more penetration of solar energy,” Lon Huber, Duke’s senior vice president of pricing and customer solutions told Utility Dive last January. By scaling up energy storage in a state that recently made utility-scale solar its dominant source of electricity production (it surpassed coal in 2023), it makes sense for more solar customers to effectively become energy suppliers as well.

Workforce development

Ongoing concerns over sustained outages notwithstanding, Elliott says that Helene had minimal impact on immediate supply chains. “Those are issues we’re keeping an eye on, specifically with batteries. There’s such a high demand and ensuring manufacturers can keep up with production is the biggest thing … forecasting is really important to us.” In tandem, she cites workforce development as a key concern. “We’re a turnkey company. We don’t sub out work, and we want to keep it that way from a quality control perspective,” she says.

Having the staff in place, including installers, electricians, finance experts, and salespeople, among other specialties, to meet growing demand will indeed test Renu Energy’s forecasting capabilities. As will the likely success of Duke Energy’s VPP incentive program, which is being rolled out over a ten-year period. “We want to ensure we have the ability to staff at the scale we anticipate is needed,” Elliott says. Thus far, the PowerPair program has had a noticeable impact on the adoption of storage, raising it to 92% within the areas where Duke Energy operates, according to Sherman.

The X factor is the frequency and severity of climate events in these regions, and how equipped industries like energy and home construction are to withstand their effects and bounce back. It is clear efforts tied to home weatherization and codifying higher building standards are critical. It is also clear that the work of scaling up renewable energy production and storage, while simultaneously alleviating stress on a gradually hardening grid, is well underway. Amidst such climatic chaos, that’s at least one thing to be thankful for.

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