Hurricane Beryl Hit His Home. Solar Power Kept His Lights On.

Brent McNiel watched the forecast closely as Hurricane Beryl shifted course and approached the Texas coast earlier this week. With just 24 hours before the storm's landfall, he did not like what he saw.

"It actually zeroed in on our house," McNiel told Newsweek in a phone interview.
Beryl's eye was rolling right toward the McNiel family's home in the Houston suburb of Richmond. The Category 1 hurricane knocked out power to more than 2 million customers.

"The whole neighborhood was just pitch black," McNiel said, "but obviously my lights were still on."

The McNiel home had electricity in the wake of the storm thanks to the solar system he sells for a living. McNiel is regional sales manager for Sunrun Solar, which bills itself as "the number one home solar and battery company in America." McNiel is also a satisfied customer, with a Sunrun system on his home feeding power from PV panels into Tesla Powerwall batteries to make the sun-generated electricity available through the night.

While McNiel's air conditioning hummed along, he saw his powerless neighbors on one side sweltering on their front steps because the house was too hot. On the other side, neighbors were attempting to link their refrigerator to an EV battery out of desperation. That's when he decided to share his solar power.

"That's like a source of pride in Texas, that you should take care of people around you," he said.

McNiel broke out the extension cords to link up his neighbors and keep basic appliances running in two adjacent houses while hosting another family in the McNiel house.

"During the outage, we were running three times the number of fridges, at least double the number of fans and [hosting] an entire other family on a system that was really designed just for our small family of four," he said.

A Sunrun representative said similar scenes played out across the affected region as homes with solar and battery storage helped others in their community stay cool and charge phones during the long outage.

Meanwhile, much of Houston baked in the Texas summer heat without power for days. CenterPoint Energy, one of the main electricity utilities in Houston, said Thursday evening that it had 12,000 crew members at work. But even with that effort, the company said, it will take until the end of the weekend to restore service to 80 percent of affected customers.

CenterPoint, which is 25th in the energy and utility sector on Newsweek's ranking of America's Most Responsible Companies, has come under criticism for its response to the storm. Due to a glitch with the company's website, customers could not get information about which areas did or did not have power. One clever workaround involved using a fast-food app as a proxy. If the local Whataburger—a Texas culinary institution—was open, people learned, that meant other nearby stores and gas stations probably had power, too.

Beryl is among the first storms in a hurricane season that forecasters warn could be among the busiest in history. As Beryl churned through the extraordinarily warm waters of the Caribbean, it became the earliest Category 5 storm ever recorded, wreaking havoc on island nations before crossing the Yucatán Peninsula where it weakened on its way to Texas.

The risks of tropical storms and other climate-driven extremes such as excessive heat, inland flooding and wildfire are heightened this summer in the U.S. in a season that follows a year of record-setting heat globally. That brings new challenges for electric utility companies, especially those along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

A report last month from Deloitte Research Center found that weather-related disruptions are affecting more electricity consumers and for longer periods.

Deloitte's analysis showed that power demand losses due to weather events more than doubled between 2014 and 2018. In just the past five years, the length of electricity outages grew by a third and the number of people affected went up nearly 20 percent to about 66 million customers around the country.

"There's a lot more complicated things that utility planners need to take into account to address the climate change that's happening," electric utility consultant Wei Du told Newsweek.

Du worked for New York utility Con Edison and now, with the company PA Consulting, he advises power companies on building grid resilience to make them better able to withstand more frequent and fierce storms.

Du said that for many utilities, building climate resilience will include hardening infrastructure, installing stronger power poles and making substations more robust. CenterPoint proposed such a resiliency plan in April, but implementation will take time.

In addition, Du said, the rapid growth of rooftop solar and battery storage can play an important role in electric grid resilience to climate impacts.

"Utilities are recognizing that this does need to happen," Du said, adding that pilot projects are underway in some regions to make better use of the pockets of solar and power storage to aide communities during emergency outages.

"Having that little bubble of survivability, or the island of resiliency, is going to be key for the neighborhood to ride out the storm and be OK," he said.

Making Climate a Building Priority

Across the Gulf of Mexico from Houston, where hurricanes frequently hammer Florida's Gulf Coast, a new housing development in the town of Cortez uses solar power and storage as part of a plan to make homes more climate resilient.

"The first priority was that we were going to build homes that generate more power than they consume," developer Marshall Gobuty, founder and president of Pearl Homes, told Newsweek.

Pearl's Hunters Point development sits on a peninsula just behind the barrier island of Bradenton Beach, near Sarasota. Each home has a solar and battery storage system to provide at least enough electricity for its own power needs.

Additionally, Gobuty said, the design and construction are meant to withstand wind damage, and the homes' bases are elevated to stay well above floodwaters.

"We are literally on the Gulf and we're in a flood zone," he said. "We had to make sure that when we built this community that it would stand up to all these."

In test runs, he said, the houses can remain electrified during a grid outage for two weeks, although the battery power duration will obviously depend on the electricity usage.

The homes faced another test last August when Hurricane Idalia and a "king" tide—or exceptionally high tide—pushed water into the surrounding neighborhood but Hunters Point stayed dry.

Gobuty said he wants the new development to be a model for other home builders in vulnerable but desirable coastal areas.

"I picked the right spot to prove this model, at the exact eye of the storm, for lack of a better word," he said. The homes are designed to both withstand climate impacts and be part of the climate solution. The structures are net-zero in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and meet the highest environmental design standards to gain LEED Platinum certification.

Gobuty said, "To be a home builder that thinks about the future, you have to consider climate change as your number one priority."

Challenges for Electric Utilities

Gobuty said a solar development like his could become the nexus for a microgrid or virtual power plant to make greater use of the sun power it generates.

Arrangements like those would work in concert with the surrounding electric system to assist the community during disruptions and feed more power into the grid during normal operations. However, he said, he has faced resistance from his local electric utility, Florida Power & Light.

Florida Power & Light ranks 35th in the energy and utilities sector on Newsweek's 2023 list of the Most Trustworthy Companies in America. FPL declined an interview request for this story and instead sent written comments via email that did not directly address the issues Gobuty raised.

"The company prepares year-round, as it has for decades, for hurricanes and other forms of severe weather," the statement read in part. "This includes storm-response training for our employees and continuously building a stronger, smarter and more storm-resilient energy grid."

Industry consultant Du said that while rooftop solar and distributed energy sources offer some great advantages, they also bring challenges for electric utilities.

"Those systems may be very beneficial on storm days, but those systems are actually causing some interesting dynamics on the [electric] system during the normal days," he said.

Rooftop solar injects power back onto a grid initially designed for a one-way flow of power, he said, raising potential problems for equipment specifications and even worker safety.

The Deloitte report includes recommendations for how power companies can better integrate solar and distributed energy to meet electricity demand and increase resilience, and the Department of Energy has made virtual power plants an area of focus for research and funding.

Meanwhile, in the Houston area, Brent McNiel said he's dealing with a different kind of flood—a new surge of interest in solar and storage from people who just suffered through the latest power outage.

"My phone's been ringing off the hook."