Rebuilding with resilience in rural North Carolina

Resilience centers and disaster recovery are such perfect areas for solar to grow extra quickly in. Nobody wants a hurricane or floods or even war, but they do all continue to happen. And if people have to rebuild anyway, then at least they can build back better (to coin a phrase). A case in point from Canary Media: Post–Hurricane Helene, this community is getting creative with solar.

In Emma, a diverse, mostly immigrant neighborhood just northwest of downtown [Asheville, NC], solar energy is playing a key role in that work, offering not only a backstop for the next grid outage but also lower utility bills year-round.

Earlier this month, residents, clean energy workers, and organizers gathered to celebrate the latest addition to Emma’s growing solar capacity: a 46-kilowatt array on the rooftop of the community and cultural center owned by La Esperanza (“the hope” in Spanish), a neighborhood real estate co-op formed in 2019.

In addition to clean, distributed, and resilient power, they’ve created a mobile version as well:

They instead have a trailer outfitted with 900 watts of solar panels and a smaller battery to help do the job. The box on wheels, another Footprint donation, is able to plug into the community center and function as a mini generator for crucial services, including the internet, refrigeration, and the pump for a drinking-water well the collective drilled on-site the winter after Helene destroyed an Asheville water main. The damage left most of the city without clean tap water for nearly two months.

That organization mentioned there is Footprint Project, which is dedicated to doing this kind of wonderful recovery work across the US.

Later in that same article is another clever innovation from that area of the country. Mobile homes apparently aren’t well-suited to having solar panels installed on them, so instead they’ve built out custom-made porches next to the unit. What a great upgrade that would be: extra shaded living space, in addition to the electricity generated.

This is the kind of work that deserves every penny of funding it can get.