When Hurricane Ida knocked out all eight of the transmission lines that bring power to New Orleans, it highlighted a vulnerability in the way the state keeps the lights on. The entire city went dark.
But what if the lights could stay on – at least in some places – even if the transmission towers that take electricity from the power plants and transport it to where people live failed again? What if the power was being generated in those neighborhoods?
That question, of whether Louisiana can embrace “distributed” energy, has taken on new life after Ida left millions in the dark earlier this year.
The advocacy group Together New Orleans, in a series of community gatherings, sketched out a push for 85 to 100 “community lighthouses” around the city, where churches or other community centers would be equipped with solar panels and back-up batteries that could keep some power flowing even if a storm knocked out the broader grid.
The Alliance for Affordable Energy also sees such “microgrids” as a way to make southeast Louisiana more resilient in the face of storms, which are increasing in intensity and frequency because of climate change. And the Gulf States Renewable Energy Industries Association is asking the Louisiana Public Service Commission to push for community solar.
The effort would require rethinking how Louisiana’s electric grid works, something advocates say is overdue.
“We need more reliability, we need more resilience to the grid, and we need more assets in the grid,” said Jon Wellinghoff, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees utilities at the federal level. He now works for the electricity market startup Voltus, Inc.
“These things go against the old traditional historical utility business model,” he said. “That business model, as we all know, is not working for us anymore.”
Microgrids are also part of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ Climate Initiatives Task Force, which aims to get Louisiana to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The task force noted there is money in the infrastructure bill to help implement microgrids and recommended immediately deploying microgrids and dispatchable batteries through pilot projects.
$10,000 batteries are needed to keep electricity running in an outage
But there are limits to how much solar can help in Louisiana’s fight to make its electric grid more resilient, experts say.
For one, they are expensive. To create a microgrid that can operate when the rest of the grid is knocked offline — even a basic one, with a few solar panels on a roof — expensive batteries are needed. The upfront cost is too high for many homeowners across south Louisiana and renters usually don’t have the option to install them.
Louisiana ranks 49th among the 50 states for renewable energy consumption as a share of the state’s total, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Louisiana relies heavily on natural …….
Source: https://www.nola.com/news/hurricane/article_6a721e54-6364-11ec-9c37-2fcfcb7fe8cd.html