If you’d like to discuss energy issues, contact Court Rich, Co-Chair of Rose Law Group’s Renewable Energy Department at crich@roselawgroup.com?
When Hurricane Sandy wiped out the power in areas like coastal Long Island and the Jersey Shore, what should have been beacons of hope — hundreds of solar panels glinting from residential rooftops — became symbols of frustration, reports The New York Times.
So when the storm took down power lines and substations across the Northeast, safety systems cut the power in solar homes just like everywhere else.
Yet there are ways to tap solar energy when the grid goes down, whether by adding batteries to a home system or using the kinds of independent solar generators that have been cropping up in areas hard-hit by the storm.
“The grid won’t evolve into something more distributed and fault-tolerant overnight — it’s still dependent upon a centralized system,” said Ben Tarbell, vice president for products at SolarCity, a leading installer that has donated generators after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and is developing a battery backup system for its customers. “But the components are starting to come together.”
In the storm’s wake, solar companies have been donating equipment across New York and other stricken areas to function as emergency power systems now and backups in the longer term. It is important, executives say, to create smaller, more decentralized ways of generating and storing electricity to help ease strain on the grid in times of high demand or failure.
Certain systems allow solar panels to run a household directly during prolonged power failures, generally combined with battery storage to keep the power functioning around the clock. Those require installing a separate electrical panel and a more complicated inverter that would switch the flow of electricity entirely over to the house, perhaps to a few critical circuits to run, say, the refrigerator, some lights, television and minimal heat.
Some are looking at electric vehicles as potential backup energy sources instead. In some cases, a car could fuel a house for days on a single charge.
