Two words: Solar panels.
For nearly eight hours one day in late January, the power to Sam Bryan’s house blinked off after a transformer near his greater Third Ward lot blew a fuse.
The same transformer has long had issues, he said, leading to blackouts at Bryan’s house and those of his neighbors several times a year. But in January, Bryan’s lights stayed on, thanks to 43 photovolatic solar panels bolted onto his roof and a battery system stored in his garage. Instead of comforting his 4-year-old, who had grown anxious during power outages since the freeze of February 2021, they played a game.
“It was a pretty neat experience,” he said. “Part of the fun was that I don’t have to explain why we can’t turn the lamp on.”
Bryan is among thousands of Texans who have turned to solar power and battery storage, creating so-called microgrids, as a solution to blackouts. With a venture creating the same little power plants for apartment buildings, Texas has become a national leader in residential solar power installations.
From 2019 to 2020, small-scale solar capacity in Texas grew by 63 percent, to 1,093 megawatts from 670 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the first three quarters of 2021, another 250 megawatts of residential solar were installed in the state, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In last year’s third quarter alone, Texas ranked second behind California in the amount of power from new installations during the period, the industry’s Washington, D.C. trade group said.
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Rooftop solar systems and other residential generators like those powered by diesel or batteries can create microgrids to power an individual house or be linked to others in a neighborhood. They can operate as part of the main power grid — like the one managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas that almost collapsed last year — or they can disconnect and be managed autonomously during a power outage.
The flip of a switch can disconnect a microgrid from the larger utility, says Stephen Bayne, department chair of electrical and computer engineering at Texas Tech University. It can be as simple as a breaker in a garage or a computer system that automatically disconnects from the grid when there’s a disruption. More advanced microgrid systems, sometimes known as virtual power plants, can track usage, generation and battery storage across multiple buildings. It also prevents the microgrid’s power from flowing to the wider grid during emergencies.
“So let’s say the grid has to turn off for some reason, say in Houston you had flooding and part of grid is underwater, but not a certain community,” Bayne said. “That area could still lose power for days, but if the community had a microgrid, it could disconnect and use a diesel generator, battery storage, solar — it could keep grid going, or at least keep critical loads going for a while.”
Sounds pretty good, no? The main obstacle is the up-front cost, which can be in the mid-to-high five figures, though federal tax incentives can bring it down some. You do get much lower utility bills, which pays you back over time, but if you can’t spend fifty or sixty grand for the panels and the battery equipment, this won’t be for you. We need to think about some creative ways to defray those initial capital costs for homeowners, so more people can do this.