Environomics: Renewable Resilience
Reality has conspired to knock down yet another anti-environmental message from the Trump Administration.
Solar power facilities have shown little damage from Hurricane Florence and its aftermath, and the single utility-scale wind power facility in North Carolina never stopped operating during the storm. Decentralized solar facilities in particular showed the value of multiple generation sites not reliant on a single point failure source in operations and power transmission.
According to Duke Energy, one-third of its solar energy installations were affected by the storm at some point, either by threat of direct flooding or downed transmission lines in their vicinity. However, major solar provider Strata Solar reports that as of Friday, all but 13 of their 140 installations in North Carolina were up and running. The advantages of a distributed power generation source show in situations where most of the capacity is back online quickly and could not be blocked by any single snarl point.
The same storm knocked out transmission connections to nearly 1.5 million electric customers in North Carolina at one point. Almost all of these customers’ service has been restored as the transmission failures were repaired.
Despite Trump Administration attempts to portray renewable energy as a threat to the reliability of the electric grid, the experience in North Carolina showed precisely the opposite. As one national energy analysis writer put it, Florence blew a hole in the Trump arguments favoring coal and nuclear over renewables.
