Solarising Cities: Strengthening Community Resilience With Renewable Microgrids
For the past half century of Big Power, large regional utilities have efficiently provided electricity and gas to millions of customers at once, by and large with admirable safety and reliability. Ratepayers have complained about rising utility bills but have experienced few extended service interruptions. That record of reliable service despite increasing demand is now being imperiled in ways that will require fundamental shifts in how we generate and distribute power.
Two recent developments greatly threaten the stability and reliability of the U.S. electrical grid — rapidly intensifying superstorms and other weather events triggered by climate change, and devastating cyberattacks by both individual hackers and state-sponsored entities wreaking havoc on the computer systems on which the entire U.S. physical infrastructure as well as the communications, transportation, food and fuel, military and other essential functions crucially depend. Hurricanes are now striking with such force as to deprive whole regions of electrical power for weeks, as in Florida, and in some cases even months — as in Puerto Rico, where it could take up to a year to restore. In such cases, inconvenience metastasizes into peril as vital services like fresh water, medical care, fire prevention and law enforcement are crippled by an absence of electrical power.
Meanwhile, hackers believed to have originated in Russia and elsewhere have successfully penetrated the U.S. power grid with increasing frequency and depth and have persistently disrupted Ukraine’s governmental and financial computer networks in what some analysts believe is a testing ground for future use on U.S. targets. As the nation most highly dependent on high tech data-driven systems to function, the U.S. is also most vulnerable to crippling disruptions. With their current centralized architecture, in the not-too-distant future regional utilities could be struck essentially deaf, dumb and blind, disabling essential functions and largely unable to function not just for hours but for weeks and months, as foreshadowed in long-term power outages caused by superstorms. The result could be chaos on a scale we can’t begin to imagine.
Fortunately, along with these potentially devastating developments, a new generation of decentralized renewable energy technologies is reaching maturity with the capability of effectively addressing some of the most serious vulnerabilities of highly centralized utility grids to superstorms and cyberattacks. Moreover, unlike nuclear power they are neither extremely expensive nor plagued by safety concerns. In fact, they’re not so much high tech as mid-tech, sophisticated without being unduly complicated, and on a scale small enough to be built and maintained at a municipal or even neighborhood level. Solar microgrids, wedding solar arrays with energy storage and state-of-the-art inverters have begun to be installed around the country, first in remote sites like military bases where it would be too costly to run power lines and more recently in select urban neighborhoods ranging from college campuses and small towns to a Brooklyn mixed-income community and a Native American casino.
A Dense Deployment of Urban Solar Microgrids
Up to now, however, the full potential of solar microgrids to protect essential services in urban environments when the main grid is down has not even been fully envisioned, let alone implemented. Yet it’s a less costly, more effective, and more immediately implementable approach than further centralizing our regional grids, strengthening the robustness of our electrical and information infrastructure by dispersing it into secure, self-reliant yet interconnected modules. Each microgrid would be capable of generating the power to service its own essential services on a standby or even routine basis. Taken together, they would reinforce the resilience and robustness of regional utility grids by enabling microgrids to instantly decouple and operate independently whenever the main grid is under threat.
Since solar generates energy only during peak daylight hours these microgrids are linked to energy storage modules, usually in the form of lithium ion or lead acid battery banks and inverters that convert the 12-volt direct current generated by the panels to the 110-volt alternating current that is standard on the main grid. Energy storage is key to the viability of renewably powered microgrids since without efficient and cost-effective storage solar and wind end up flooding the main grid with too much energy during their peak output and thus destabilizing it. Fortunately, storage options are rapidly proliferating as demand rises, including some highly inventive, surprisingly low-tech ideas. Meanwhile, lithium ion batteries are experiencing the same kinds of dramatic price drops solar and wind have in the past several years, bringing them into the range of affordability for municipalities.
Depending on the capacity of the microgrid’s energy storage, they are capable of operating independently for several days at a time. If the storage capacity is sufficient, microgrids can perform as more than a standby power source; they can become their own self-reliant systems, generating and using all their own energy and even supplying surplus power to adjacent buildings or neighborhoods. With a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sunshot program, the city of San Francisco has launched a “Solar+Storage for Resiliency project (Solar Resilient) [that] aims to expand the solar market by serving as a national model for integrating solar and energy storage into the City’s Emergency Response Plans.”
Addressing The Concerns of Utilities
Major regional utilities are deeply concerned that if microgrids are allowed to proliferate in their core urban markets they will find their primary revenue source drying up and will be left with only those customers who haven’t the means, funding or initiative to form their own microgrids. It is essential to come to agreements between resilient microgrid advocates and regional utilities that acknowledge and support the crucial roles of both in providing reliable, secure power to their customers. But clearly the role of investor-owned utilities is changing in fundamental ways as the market opens up and energy is generated by an ever wider variety of entities. Going forward, public utilities may find a profitable new role for themselves as large-scale energy storage providers through major projects like pumped hydro and thermal energy installations that are simply too expensive and space-consuming for neighborhood microgrids to build and maintain independently in high-cost, tightly confined urban environments.
A relationship between distributed energy advocates and public utilities that up to now has been somewhat adversarial needs to be transformed into a joint design process to produce a vision and plan for a next-generation resilient energy grid integrating the strongest points of each. This is not as unlikely a prospect as it might seem. Already in pilot microgrids, local builders and utility technical staff have found it easy and rewarding to work together on projects whose objectives both can believe in. Add to this the compelling shared motivation of strengthening the resilience of the grid and they have every reason to work together towards a shared solution.
Cities Lead the Way
In keeping with the localized nature of this approach, progress doesn’t depend on federal action. Cities and towns across the country, as well as private corporations, are ideally positioned to microgrid their own jurisdictions neighborhood by neighborhood, facility by facility. They would best begin by building resilient microgrids to provide alternative power to those public services — hospitals, schools, law enforcement and fire departments, food and fuel suppliers, gas stations and grocery stores — that are deemed most essential in case of sudden disruptions of the main utility grid.
This city-centered approach to urban renewable microgridding would be rapidly advanced if adopted by powerful new coalitions of cities across the country in both blue and red states that have re-committed to the terms of the Paris climate accord in the wake of President Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the agreement. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a driving force behind city climate coalitions like the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, and California Jerry Brown, whose state leads the country and much of the world in climate-protective policies, have forged an agreement to work together on climate-related issues. This alliance adds potent new momentum to the movement of cities and states to take pioneering roles in climate protection. Adding superstorm and cyber-protection to their existing climate agenda of going 100 percent renewable is a natural pairing since cities are the primary targets of cyberattacks and most vulnerable to superstorms and microgridding cities achieves both objectives at once. And by embarking on accelerated microgridding programs in their urban cores they can achieve their 100 percent goals in a fraction of the time they currently project.
Solar Savings Bonds: Innovative Financing Options
Financing the construction of microgrids need not be an expensive or burdensome proposition nor an obstacle to rapid deployment. The costs of microgridding essential services are not exorbitant and can be financed in multiple ways. Moreover, after a certain number of years (usually 5–8), the projects have achieved their return on investment (ROI) and begin to generate substantial revenues for their owners in money saved by not having to pay outside entities for electric power. Microgridding urban cores is an essential infrastructure and population protection measure deserving of the highest municipal priority, with bond issues to support their construction and maintenance as vital as water purification, law enforcement and fire protection. Moreover, building microgrids to protect and maintain essential services in case the grid shuts down should not be viewed as an expense but an investment in energy independence and an eventual source of substantial revenue for the city. Once the return on investment is reached (5–8 years), savings from self-generation begin to mount and grow larger with each passing year, especially as market prices for other sources of energy rise. Municipalities wishing to build microgrids can issue bonds to finance the microgridding of essential services in large denominations offered to major investors, with special emphasis on public pension funds, foundation endowments and others engaged in social impact investing.
To finance the building of residential neighborhoods, municipalities could offer “solar savings bonds” issued in denominations of $500 or more, small enough that local residents of modest means can afford to purchase them and earn better returns than savings accounts or CD’s while avoiding the risky and ethically suspect stock market. As with conventional savings bonds, the buyer would purchase the bond at a lesser initial price, then receive periodic interest payments and the face value when the bond matures. The emotional buy-in engendered by being able to invest directly in the local grid that powers your own neighborhood could be profound. How many opportunities do we have these days to invest in our own communities and witness the positive results? Knowing that what you and your neighbors have invested has made it happen and that together through your municipality you own this energy-independent power source could become a source of community identity and pride in what you’ve been able to accomplish together.
The collateral benefits of microgridding and solarising our electrical power systems are themselves substantial. They constitute a virtuous cycle akin to the synergies innate to nature’s biological processes.
Energy independence: Using solar or other locally generated renewable energy sources as the power source for microgrids eliminates a key vulnerability of systems run on fossil fuels, which are subject to oil or gas price fluctuations, global financial developments, the unstable and often despotic politics of foreign producers located in some of the world’s most conflict-ridden zones, environmental devastation, and over-extended supply lines subject to all manner of disruption. Moving from distant and destructive fossil fuels to locally generated renewables eliminates a core source of climate-destroying carbon burning in precisely those places (urban cores, industrial facilities and power plants) where most heat-producing pollution is being generated. This is energy independence at its most elemental local level, disentangled from the fragility and over-dependency innate to centralized, fossil-fueled power systems. A crash program to decentralize and solarise cities in 5–8 years would greatly accelerate the transition to 100 percent renewable electrical generation that an increasing number of them are already committing to reach by 2030 or 2035. The resulting reduction in carbon emissions could take us far closer far sooner to the critical benchmark climate scientists say is needed to keep the planet’s mean rise in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius in order to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
Municipal microgrids as new revenue sources: In addition to producing enough energy to meet the needs of their own communities, there is considerable potential for urban microgrids to collectively generate more energy than they need for their own purposes and thus develop new sources of revenue to support urgently needed infrastructure repairs. Fortuitously, economically depressed minority urban communities, by virtue of low-priced real estate, brownfields polluted by industrial toxins, and warehouses and factories with flat roofs, are especially well-suited to solar microgrids. Richmond, California, site of the massive Chevron oil refinery, includes within its city limits vast brownfields that would make ideal sites for solar arrays since they can be installed without needing to go through a costly remediation process. Moreover, with ample expanses of industrial facilities, warehouses and parking lots, Richmond offers low-cost urban land centrally located in a Bay Area that is the most expensive real estate in the country. It is already the site of a solar array on land belonging to Chevron and leased to it for $1/year. If it chooses to pursue solar microgridding, it could become a net exporter of energy to its higher-priced Bay Area neighbors, the Chevron of renewable energy.
Strengthening Our Collective Immune System
Decentralizing and solarising the grid won’t by any means eliminate the multi-dimensional threat of superstorms or cyberattacks. Even apart from shutting down power to the systems that run our tech-dependent society, there remain many ways that storms can wreak havoc and adversaries great and small can hack their way into vulnerable computer systems and sow chaos. But decentralizing the grid and dispersing its assets into many thousands of standby self-reliant modules would greatly reduce a key vulnerability.
Though resilient microgrids are yet another technological development, perhaps the best way to grasp the principle underlying their dense deployment in urban cores is not technical but biological: it is a strategy that strengthens our collective immune system in the many ways that nature routinely does in the multi-functional dynamics of a living ecosystem. A resilient ecosystem consists of many organisms that stand on their own but are intimately connected with one another, providing mutual support as needed. Highly centralized power grids, by contrast, are a fundamentally mechanistic construct, more brittle and less capable of decoupling and self-isolating to function independently in case of system failure and thus to stop the spread of a localized attack.
Strengthening our collective energy immune system is a radically different approach from conventional strategies of offense and defense. It is neither. Rather, it is an internally focused effort to summon our collective resources, build resilient communities, and regrow the bonds of mutual aid and common purpose that have atrophied during decades of over-dependence on centralized power. This kind of power threatens no one but strengthens all who participate in it. Rather than power over, it is power within and between, enriching us all.
