Last month, I stayed up all night through the most intense rainfall I’ve seen in my life. I was monitoring the flooding at our home and anticipating how to get through the next few days without power again. I’ve spent most of my career planning and creating more resilient energy systems, but nothing can show you the real stakes like living through the worst flooding Hawaii has faced in 20 years. In a span of just a few weeks, my community faced three storms that forced emergency evacuations, caused major power outages, and devasted families with flood damage to their homes and farms.
This experience strengthened my belief that as climate change continues to cause more frequent and severe storms, flooding, wildfires, and other natural disasters, we must accelerate our investments in community resilience solutions. Families can make an affordable investment now to prepare before the next disaster, and utility commissions can work toward implementing structural solutions in the long term.
During the first storm in early March, heavy rains and high winds threatened low-lying areas and caused sustained power outages across the island of Oahu. At my home, flood waters cut off the only road, and we lost power for three days. We managed for a few days, expecting this to be a one-time, historic event. But a week later, with water levels already high, a second storm dropped over a foot of rain and triggered emergency evacuations in the middle of the night. We woke up on March 20 to warnings of catastrophic flooding as a local, plantation-era dam neared failure, which could overwhelm the community with little warning. Preparing for the worst, first responders requested a preemptive power shutoff to avoid electrified floodwaters if the dam failed.
From the news reports, this preemptive action appears justified but came with no warning and left residents with few safe places during the storm. The power shutoff included all of the communities threatened by the dam failure, which meant most of the places we could still reach had no power. Fortunately, we found safe shelter at a friend’s off-grid farm. While the rest of our community struggled to recover from the flooding without power, the solar panels and battery at the farm supplied essential needs until the storm cleared.
As we recovered from the second event, a third storm formed and moved through the state a week later. Anticipating further sustained outages, I bought a battery generator and solar panels from Home Depot for about $750. This gave us just enough power to keep essentials running through another disruptive event. Individuals and families can invest in backup generation like portable solar panels and batteries, which facilitates sheltering-in-place safely for a few days. Although this is a helpful short-term solution, not everyone can afford it.
Community-level investment in resilience solutions, like resilience hubs and microgrids, remain pivotal to providing safety, and Hawaii’s recent collective experience shows this need tangibly. When disaster strikes and the power goes out for days, neighborhoods need safe, centralized places with hardened infrastructure and backup power. Places where people can charge their phone, refrigerate their insulin, access information, or just get through the immediate crisis with some sense of safety and stability. During the second storm, the local emergency shelter lacked these capabilities and required relocating the evacuees as floodwaters ultimately also overwhelmed this facility. Community resilience hubs require diligent planning and funding to make sure they’re ready when the time comes.
Fully modernizing and hardening all our infrastructure for a changing climate will take decades and lots of money. Which is why investing in a network of community resilience hubs now is a practical, cost-efficient way to provide safety for the communities most vulnerable to power outages, extreme weather, or wildfires.
And there is a real role for state utility regulators to play in enabling resilience hubs. For example, in 2021, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) authorized the Microgrid Incentive Program, including $200 million to support clean energy microgrids that serve communities particularly vulnerable to grid outages. Then, in 2024, the CPUC adopted rules for multi-property microgrid tariffs, which helped reduce barriers for microgrid deployment without shifting costs to non-participating ratepayers.
In Wisconsin, the Public Service Commission established the Critical Infrastructure Microgrid and Community Resilience Center Pilot Program. The goal of this program is to study how distributed energy resources and storage can support critical infrastructure microgrids and provide resiliency.
And while I was on the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, we took initial steps to facilitate multi-customer microgrids when we approved Hawaiian Electric’s Microgrid Services Tariffs in 2021. The docket’s working group continues to convene, with the objective of promoting self-sufficiency and resilience among microgrid project operators.
Since then, the Hawaii PUC released its 2024 Inclinations on the Future of Energy in Hawaii, which offers a roadmap to guide and track the completion of energy infrastructure upgrades for the next decade. One of the report’s key recommendations is the construction of resilience hubs in isolated, vulnerable, and/or high fire risk communities to preserve peoples’ access to critical resources during power outages.
The flooding in Hawaii is a wakeup call to the reality of our changing climate and what it will take to keep communities safe. It doesn’t take years or billions of dollars to put base level safety in place – precisely what community resilience hubs and other local solutions can provide now. They are not a complete substitute for broader grid hardening, but they are a smart and immediate way to provide resilience and safety now before the next disaster strikes.
