Severe storms and flooding from that storm could cause extended power outages across much of Florida. The storm is the latest in a series of storms and extreme heat and cold that have left millions of Americans without power for days in recent years.
In many areas prone to natural disasters and power outages, people are beginning to think that investing in solar panels and rooftop batteries will allow electricity and air conditioning to continue when the power grid is down.
When the grid goes down, most solar systems without batteries also go down. But in the case of batteries, the house can be disconnected from the network. Every day the sun illuminates the house and at night it charges the batteries that provide electricity.
Our team at Berkeley Lab studied what it takes for homes and commercial buildings to withstand power outages of three or more days using solar power and batteries.
How much can solar power + storage do?
For the new report, we simulated a complete blackout for every US county and tested a rooftop solar system combined with 10 or 30 kWh batteries to power critical loads like cooling, lighting, Internet access and more. If you can go further with electric heating and air conditioning; Or if he can even manage the whole house.
In comparison, the most popular battery on the market, the Tesla Powerwall, has a capacity of just over 13 kilowatts.
Overall, we found that even a modest single-battery solar system can handle critical household loads for several days in any part of the country.
But as our charts show, assigning frequency to cooling and heating can be challenging, but not insurmountable. Homes in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest often have solar panels and electric heaters that bypass storage options during the dark winter months. Homes with efficient heat pumps fare better. Summer air conditioning loads in the Southwest can be high, making it difficult to meet all cooling needs during summer sunshine and storage shutdowns.
Large solar and battery systems can help, but meeting demand during power outages still depends on weather, home energy efficiency and other factors. For example, simply adjusting the thermostat during power outages can reduce heating and cooling demands, allowing solar energy to be stored longer.
Electricity supply to commercial buildings varies depending on the type of building. In terms of the building's energy needs, schools and large retail stores with large footprints are better suited for solar power than tall, energy-intensive buildings such as hospitals.
How can solar power overcome 10 past disasters?
We also looked at 10 real power outages from 2017 to 2020 including hurricanes, wildfires and hurricanes, modeled site-specific building performance, and weather patterns during and after power outages.
In seven outages, most homes were able to support critical loads in addition to heating and cooling with 30 kWh of storage, or more than two Powerwalls of solar.
But the weather around the closure, especially storms, can have a big impact. In the year In 2018, after Hurricane Florence cut power to North Carolina, cloudy skies persisted for three days, halting the eclipse and even halting solar panel production.
On the other hand, in August 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas coast but continued to cause significant damage in Texas. It took a week or so for power to be restored, but skies cleared in Corpus Christi. Then solar energy and storage will be very useful, providing all the energy needs of a typical single-family house under a clear sky.
We found that solar power can perform well in non-cloudy events like the California wildfires or the 2020 Iowa fires.
The heat source in the house is also important. We found that during the five- to ten-day downtime following the 2020 Oklahoma snowstorm, solar power and a 30 kWh battery could provide all the critical power and heat needed for natural gas or gas-fired boiler houses. Heat pumps. But the houses that are heated with electric insulation remain.
More than half of the homes in Texas are heated by electricity, mostly resistance heaters. Providing both heating and cooling, ENERGY STAR qualified heat pumps use about half as much electricity per unit of heat as electric heaters and also cool more efficiently than the average new air conditioner. Converting old resistance heaters to new heat pumps not only saves you money and reduces peak demand, but also increases resilience in the event of a power outage.
New types of support
Installing solar and storage equipment to provide backup power to a home or building is more work and more expensive; Powerwall alone can cost $12,000 to $16,500 for a complete system installation, excluding incentives and taxes. That's about the same size as the solar system. However, more and more homeowners are installing both.
In the year By 2021, more than 90% of new solar installations in Hawaii will be connected to batteries under the law changes. Now these decentralized power plants are helping to run the grid as coal-fired power plants have been shut down.
There are over 1.5 million rooftop solar systems in California. More and more customers are upgrading batteries in their systems or adding new solar panels and storage, in part because utilities are moving to "public safety outages" to reduce the risk of wildfires from power lines on dry days and less wind.
Especially in electric vehicles, new types of energy storage are appearing. Ford is working with SunRun to combine the new F150 Lightning electric car with solar power and a two-way charger. The standard version of the truck comes with a 98kWh battery powered by more than seven Tesla Powervalve stationary batteries.
Critical power for critical services
A fire department in Puerto Rico shows what solar power and storage can do. In the year After Hurricane Maria knocked out power for several months in 2017, more than 40,000 solar panels were installed on the island, often with storage batteries. One of them is located in the fire department of the city of Guanica, which was unable to receive emergency calls due to a previous power outage.
In September 2022, when hurricane-force winds and flooding cut power to Puerto Rico, the fire department was still at work.
"The solar system works very well." Sergeant Lewis Sath spoke to Canary Media the day after Fiona's graduation. "We didn't lose power because of the storm." 
Will Gorman, a doctoral student in electricity markets and politics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ; Bentham Paulus, Energy Markets and Policy Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , and Galen Barbose, Research Fellow, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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