Hurricane sparks greater interest in solar power
Local solar panel companies have been flooded with calls from people interested in solar power after Hurricane Ernesto left thousands of people in the dark.
Kristian Smith, solar concierge at Greenlight Energy, received more than 20 calls from the solar-curious even before the storm ended.
“Year after year, hurricanes definitely impact our incoming calls,” Mr Smith said.
Stratton Hatfield, chief sales and marketing officer at Be Solar, experienced the same thing.
“We saw a lot more people committing to investing with us,” Mr Hatfield said. “Whenever there is a Belco outage, or an increase in the price of electricity, we always get more calls.”
People expressed interest in installing solar panels and also solar batteries.
“Without battery power, solar panels do not work when the grid is off,” Mr Smith explained.
Greenlight sells Tesla batteries and Be Solar sells Enphase.
Mr Smith said one Tesla Power Wall 2 battery allows clients to run essentials such as lights, fans and refrigerator. With two or more batteries, customers can also run air conditioning and wash clothes.
Some of the people contacting him during the storm already had one battery and wanted another to be more comfortable.
“People were thinking this way because the storm was so long in duration,” Mr Smith said.
The storm, which peaked at 89mph in some parts of the island, lasted about 48 hours.
In the aftermath, there was little damage to solar panels themselves.
“They are engineered to withstand 155mph winds,” Mr Smith said. “They are super secure.”
However, he said, there are sometimes problems with the panels being hit by foreign objects carried on the wind.
“I have about 18 solar panels myself and they have knocked down our electricity bill by about 70 per cent,” he said. “We are getting batteries in October.”
Some solar customers did experience challenges when they could not access the internet during the storm to monitor their panels.
Mr Hatfield, at Be Solar, said people are increasingly looking at solar panels as a way to increase their property values.
“They look at it as a long-term investment,” he said.
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