When Hurricane Dorian hit the northern Bahamas in 2019, the Category 5 storm caused almost appreciable damage to some of the islands.
There is a growing consensus among scientists that climate change is making hurricanes stronger and more destructive. It’s very bad news for the Bahamas, a string of more than seven hundred islands stretching from Florida almost to Cuba, in the heart of what’s known as the “Street of Hurricanes.”
When we visited in late 2019, hurricane recovery was just beginning, but we found that the Bahamas had found a ray of hope that might survive future hurricanes, namely a solar array. And in the process, it may have important lessons for the rest of the world.
With sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, gusts of over 200 and a storm surge of over 20 feet in some places, Dorian wreaked unimaginable devastation on the Bahama Islands known as the Abacos.
“There aren’t enough words in the dictionary to describe what Hope Town was like after that storm,” Vernon Malone told reporter Bill Whitaker.
Hope Town has been Malone’s home for all of his 82 years. His family has lived here since 1785. He is the village baker and grocer, and he and his wife survived the storm in his shop. He survived, but their house on the street was not.
Vernon’s son, Brian, had a house around the corner. He had a house.
“That’s really two and a half houses,” Brian Malone said when Whitaker pointed out a pile of debris. — Mine is downstairs.
Hope Town is a Bahamian landmark. Its candy-striped lighthouse dates back to 1863 and is featured on the country’s ten-dollar bill. The lighthouse was erected for Doria, but as we saw her entering the harbor, nothing more was done.
“I hear generators everywhere,” Whitaker told Brian Malone and Matt Winslow, an American who owns a vacation home on the island. “Is this how you guys are doing?”
Winslow told Whitaker why all those generators are still running.
“The substation in Marsh Harbor that feeds us has been destroyed,” Winslow said. “And then, of course, you can see all the light poles … they’re pretty much destroyed. So this isn’t a case where — you go in and replace some poles, and you hit a switch. This is months, and months, and months. … working months”.
Hope Town is located on one of several small islands destroyed by Dorian, which then moved 7 miles across open water to Marsh Harbor, the largest town in the Abacos. At least 60 people died in Marsh Harbour, and the devastation is still everywhere. Dorian’s damage and losses total $3.4 billion.
“When you see the extent of the destruction, where do you start?” Whitaker asked Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis. “How do you start?”
“That’s always the question,” Minnis said. “Where do we start?”
The then Prime Minister of the Bahamas, Hubert Minnis, and his assistant, Viana Gardiner, visited Marsh Harbor with us and stated a top priority: restoring electrical power.
“How do you bring this back?” Whitaker asked.
“Power,” Minnis said. “We had to take the determination to implement microgrids.”
The microgrids that Prime Minister Minnis is talking about are small-scale systems. Increasingly, they are solar arrays with battery storage for when the sun is not out. They can feed electricity into a larger grid or operate independently to power a single facility or a district. The way electricity has been produced in the Bahamas is with diesel fueled power plants on each living island, about 30 in total, to feed electricity to everyone via overhead lines.
“The main power station on this island is literally 25 miles south of here,” Chris Burgess said. “That’s 25 kilometers of line that needs to be rebuilt.”
Burgess and Justin Locke run the “Island Energy Program” for an American non-profit called the Rocky Mountain Institute. They have solar projects all over “Hurricane Alley”. After Category 5 Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, microgrids were installed on the roofs of ten schools. Maria also made the San Vicente brush, and now she has installed the first microgrid. Now, the Islands Energy Program has arrived in Marsh Harbour.
“So how big is this solar cluster going to be?” Whitaker asked.
“15 acres,” Burgess said. – From now on.
That microgrid will meet 10 percent of Marsh Harbor’s total power needs, and will be built between its government center and hospital, both of which were without power in the weeks after Dorian.
“This is high ground, which makes it more vulnerable to storm surges or other types of disasters,” Locke said.
“So if a storm like Dorian hits again, the power to these two critical facilities stays on?” Whitaker asked.
The push to build storm-proof solar arrays in the Bahamas began in 2017 after Hurricane Irma, another Category 5 storm, ripped through tiny Ragged Island at the southern end of the island chain.
“After the destruction of Ragged Island, I made a statement: let’s show the world what can be done,” said Prime Minister Minnis. “We may be small, but we can set an example to the world.”
Minnis said his goal is to make Ragged Island a green island.
“Absolutely. After that, we can expand it. We can expand it,” Minnis said.
To see the Prime Minister’s green experiment, Whitaker traveled to Ragged Island with Whitney Heastie, CEO of government-owned utility Bahamas Power and Light. Engineer Burlington Strachan met us there and called us to the first hurricane-proof solar array being installed in the Bahamas.
“Unlike other solar designs, it’s very low to the ground,” Strachan said. “So this facility can withstand winds of 180 kilometers per hour.”
The 180 mph winds pack a stronger punch than when Irma made landfall in 2017.
“It was a major disaster on this island. As you can see, some of the poles broke right at the base of the pole,” Strachan said. “That happened all over the island.”
This microgrid will produce enough electricity for about 100 residents of Ragged Island. The prime minister calls the laboratory for the solar future. The past is a diesel generator that requires ships to deliver fuel hundreds of miles away, a system “a nightmare,” says Whitney Heastie.
“You know, we’re running out of fuel in the summer on some of these islands because the bad weather sometimes prevents ships from getting to some of these places,” Heastie said.
The Bahamian government spends nearly $400 million a year on imported fuel to keep its power plants running and passes that cost on to its citizens. They pay three to four times what people in the continental US pay for electricity.
“Okay, and that’s not price gouging,” Burgess said. “I mean, that’s just an inherent cost.”
Everything costs more on the islands. The bill to install a new solar microgrid on Ragged Island is $3 million. Heastie insists it’s money well spent.
“So you have this huge upfront expense to build these panels,” Whitaker told Heastie. “But over time, does the cost of generating energy really go down?”
“Absolutely,” Heastie said. “Using what God has blessed us with, which is the natural sun.”
It’s not a perfect solution in Ragged Island; significantly, the power from these panels will still be fed into vulnerable overhead power lines; the money is not yet buried.
“I think one of the first things everyone can agree on is that everything needs to go underground,” Matt Winslow said.
Back in Hope Town, Winslow says they have the funds to bury their lines. Americans with second homes here add so much to the economy, Winslow’s family foundation has donated nearly $1 million to rebuilding efforts. They already have a microgrid to power the fire station and health clinic, and Winslow has hired engineers to plan a much larger one on a nearby island.
“It’s possible to put, you know, a solar array in Great Abacon, 18 acres,” Winslow said. “That power is by pipeline…preferably a new submarine cable to the island. And that could be our main source of power.”
Winslow said it would be enough to feed the island.
The Bahamas’ goal is to produce 30% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030. Justin Locke and Chris Burgess of the Islands Energy Program believe the country can do even better.
“The price of renewables has come down to the point where they are very, very competitive with diesel,” Burgess said. “And in most cases, much cheaper than diesel.”
“The top change has been battery storage,” Locke said. “Battery storage has reduced the cost by more than 60% in the last five years. And what battery storage does is it allows the sun to shine when the sun isn’t shining. Renewables make more sense here than anywhere else in the world.”
And in the Caribbean, microgrids are starting to show their worth. When the earthquake hit Puerto Rico in 2020, the entire island’s large electrical grid shut down for days. But remember those solar microgrogrids installed in schools? They continued to give power. The lessons can be applied anywhere.
“California has the same system architecture here as the Caribbean, right? Fossil fuels, long transmission lines,” Locke said. “And you see that PG&E had to proactively shut down millions of people to prevent the fire.”
“Could it be that if these microgrids had been in place, PG&E wouldn’t have had to cut power to millions of consumers?” Whitaker asked.
Here in the Bahamas there are still major economic barriers. Dorian’s losses are almost 30% of the country’s total annual GDP.
“You’ve got this incredible expense to rebuild these islands that Dorian destroyed,” Whitaker told Premier Minnis. “Can’t you bring me a new electric creation?”
“We can’t afford it,” Minnis said. “We recognized from day one that we couldn’t do it alone.”
A few weeks after Dorian hit, then Prime Minister Minnis spoke at the United Nations. He stressed that most of the Bahamas is not affected and longing for tourists, the lifeblood of the economy. He then said that first world countries and their pollution are at least partly to blame for the increasingly powerful hurricane threat.
“The First World nations — and this is what I said at the UN. I said that the First World nations are the biggest contributors to climate change,” Minnis told Whitaker. “They are responsible for the changes we see. The increase in the speed and severity of hurricanes and the different– and the changes we see today, typhoons, but we are the innocent victims. We are. who are being influenced by what you have created.’
Minnis and other island nation leaders have proposed that the U.S. and European countries contribute to an insurance fund — think of it as a “rainy day” fund — to help rebuild from future storms.
“That’s what you say, and what you said at the UN, First World nations should do?” Whitaker asked Minnis.
“It’s an ongoing debate,” Minnis said. “It’s a constant debate.”
“Does this make the shift to renewable energy that much more important, essential, urgent for you here in the Bahamas?” Whitaker asked.
“That’s it,” Minnis said. “Although our contribution to climate change is small, it is small compared to a First World nation, but we still have a responsibility.”
Since this story aired in 2020, that microgrid we saw being installed on Ragged Island is now operational and supplying all the electricity the island needs. They haven’t had to send in diesel fuel to run that old generator for many months, which is especially welcome given that the price of fuel has gone up.
The Bahamas has a new government and a new prime minister, and it says it is as committed to solar energy as its predecessors.
Produced by Rome Hartman. Associate Producer, Sara Kuzmarov. Member of the show, Emilio Almonte. Edited by Matt Richman and Aisha Crespo.
Only 51% of insolation reaches the earth’s surface, 35% is reflected into space by atmospheric layers and 14% is absorbed by the atmosphere.
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