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William and Lara Maisch thought they could count on one thing after Hurricane Irma battered their Clearwater, Florida, home: sufficient power from their solar panels.

Their panels had withstood the storm, but the Maisches were still left sweltering in the dark along with about 15 million other Floridians. When the grid goes down, whether due to extreme events like recent hurricanes or to human action, everything connected must go down as well— even the greenest homes.

“I thought the whole point to solar was to have power all the time, or at least when it is sunny,” said William Maisch, who felt disillusioned that this hasn’t proven to be the case.

Tampa Electric Company solar panels meant to power some 3,000 area homes.

His comments reflect the gap between the promise of solar and the current reality. Despite all the talk about solar, just over 1.4 million U.S. households have adopted the expensive technology as of mid-2017. Florida’s two biggest power companies said only about 13,000 of their combined 7 million residential customers have grid-tied solar systems.

The experiences, and frustrations, of the Maisches and other early adopters provide a window into the state of the technology and its future. One lesson hurricanes Irma and Harvey made clear is that going green is not the same as going off the grid. For a host of safety, technical, and regulatory reasons, solar customers are often as dependent on non-renewable energy sources as traditional power company customers if they want to keep the lights on around the clock.

Most states make it difficult to live off the grid, and Florida bans it outright. But regulatory compliance aside, keeping a home on the grid ensures a dependable source of power regardless of whether or not the sun’s shining. And as long as the house is tied to the grid, it makes sense for a homeowner interested in solar to install grid-tied panels and take advantage of so-called “net metering.”  These policies, which have been adopted by most states, require utilities to allow homeowners to receive credits on any excess energy produced by their grid-connected systems.

While solar owners are not obligated to do this, net metering is one of the big economic selling points of the technology.  It helps solar owners to further lower future energy bills and slowly recoup the high up-front cost of installation, which can be a long process. The Maisches, for example, took out $30,000 in loans for panels. They estimate that it’ll be 10 years before that pays off — right in line with the return on investment that solar advocacy groups predict.

However, as the Maisches and others learned after the hurricanes, when the grid goes down, so too must the solar collectors connected to it. Otherwise, without additional tech to automatically isolate their system from the grid, solar owners would be sending power into the system utility workers are trying to repair. This would be “very dangerous for line workers,” said Stephen Doig, managing director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit group working for the increased adoption of renewable energy sources.

Some individual storage systems exist that operate separately from the grid, but they’re costly — for example, the new Tesla Powerwall 2.0 system, which operates as more of a solar-powered home battery, starts at $11,700 for a medium-sized home. Any homeowner with this type of home technology would have had power during the hurricane outages.

“I would like to, down the road, purchase two to three batteries for storage and emergency power,” said Damian Davis, 39, a solar homeowner in Miami who lost power after Irma. “If I had the batteries done with the panels then post-Hurricane Irma wouldn’t have been a problem for my family. But I’m doing these upgrades in stages.”

Middletown Springs, Vermont, homeowner Rhonda Phillips with her Tesla Powerwall battery.

Improving solar storage options is what would make broader solar expansion truly practicable says Yogi Goswami, a professor at the University of South Florida and innovator in the field of energy storage. Experiments that offer a preview into what homes running around the clock on solar panels and batteries could look like are already under way. However, because of the expense and the space that panels require, Duke Energy spokeswoman Ana Gibbs said, most of the solar homeowners currently on Duke’s grid use their systems for something small, like powering a pool heater, as opposed to running the home.

Among solar owners investing in rooftop panels, feelings are mixed. Some, like Damian Davis, realize significant savings off the bat. Davis said that his 34 panels, installed in February, reduced his utility bill nearly $400 over the summer.

By contrast, the Maisches are still in the delayed gratification stage of financial payoff. They installed their first panels just over a month ago. When the installation is completed, they’ll have 29 panels in total, and a monthly loan payment that is comparable to their monthly energy bills in years past.

“I honestly thought that getting solar panels would help us in times of need, but all it has really done is shifted who gets the greater portion of our payment from Duke [Energy] to the loan company,” Maisch said.

Nevertheless, solar advocates see the power outages following the recent hurricanes as a strong argument to invest in solar. Millions lost power, they say, because they were all tied to the same massive grid.

By enabling many more energy collection points, solar can allow for decentralized microgrid systems. Doig and Goswami agree that these would be more resilient in outages. Combined with improved storage, they would dramatically reduce the scale of any one grid crash.

For utilities, an increase in homeowner solar could threaten the traditional profit model if they find themselves maintaining the all-important grid but selling less power. Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently proposed changing how regional markets price electricity, potentially walking back the effects of the solar disruption.

For homeowners, the key question remains whether or not solar is worth it – financially, practically and psychologically.  And while satisfied solar owners abound, for William Maisch it’s hard to get past the fact that the technology is not yet what he hoped it would be.

“We went seven days without power because of Irma, while my solar panels sat on the roof doing nothing,” Maisch said. “Yes, it was very frustrating.”

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