March 20, 2025
Alison Coffey
The need for resilient, reliable, clean energy is more critical than ever, especially in frontline and disaster-impacted communities. Last fall, Hurricane Helene left 5.5 million households across Appalachia and the Southeast without power, with tens of thousands in the dark for multiple weeks. During the recent Los Angeles fires, hundreds of thousands of people experienced outages, as damaging winds downed power lines and public safety power shutoffs went into effect to prevent utility infrastructure from sparking additional fires. As climate change makes extreme weather more frequent and severe, prolonged outages are only likely to increase.
Alongside these trends, recent executive orders and actions by the Trump administration further threaten our ability to prepare for and respond to these crises. Directives to unleash fossil fuel production and pull back renewable energy investments, the dismantling of multiple federal agencies tasked with keeping the public safe from environmental risks, as well as threats to withhold or place political conditions on federal disaster aid to certain states all mean that building climate and energy resilience at the state and local levels is more urgent than ever.
Communities are increasingly seeking local, decentralized, resilient energy solutions that can lower skyrocketing energy bills and minimize disruptions during extreme weather. But these challenges are not felt equally. When the power goes out for days or weeks, marginalized populations often bear the greatest burden, facing disproportionate risks to their health, safety, and economic security. Often, they are forced to go longer periods of time before power is restored to their neighborhoods. A just energy future requires resilience investments that prioritize BIPOC, low-income, and other vulnerable communities disproportionately harmed by climate disasters and energy injustice.
In this context, community microgrids represent one local-scale solution for meeting this growing need.
What is a community microgrid?
Microgrids are small-scale, decentralized, self-sufficient power systems that generate and store their own power from distributed sources, such as solar, wind, thermal, or biofuel energy. They may exist separately from the grid, using solar panels and battery storage as a form of clean backup power during an emergency. They may also be grid-connected, able to sell renewable energy back to their local utility during normal conditions and disconnect or “island” during an outage to keep their lights on until power is restored.
Microgrids have long offered a source of emergency backup power for facilities such as hospitals, industrial plants, and college campuses. Now, there is growing momentum to deploy microgrids for the public good, powering community infrastructure such as libraries, community centers, public buildings, and even affordable housing developments with resilient clean energy.
These networks of community infrastructure powered by renewable microgrids – also referred to as community resilience hubs – can serve multiple purposes. During outages or disasters, local governments can depend on community microgrids to ensure fewer interruptions to the coordination and delivery of emergency services. Resilience hubs also provide safe havens where community members can shelter from extreme heat or cold, refrigerate crucial medications, charge cell phones, or plug in life-sustaining medical devices.
Community microgrids offer benefits to community institutions during non-emergency times as well. On a normal day, community microgrids can deliver electricity cost savings to users, allowing them to draw upon battery-stored energy at peak load times when electricity costs are higher or to sell the renewable energy they generate back to the grid in times of high demand.
Making community microgrids a reality
Several local efforts to make this a reality are already underway. In Massachusetts, an innovative “community-owned virtual microgrid” is currently under development. It is set to serve the City of Chelsea and Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood, two environmental justice communities (EJ communities) with large immigrant and low-income populations vulnerable to climate impacts. Led by a coalition of community organizations in partnership with clean energy technical organizations and the local governments, phase one of the Chelsea-Chinatown microgrid will outfit city government buildings and an affordable housing tower with solar and storage systems, providing them with backup power during outages and the ability to use their own stored energy during peak load times. Cloud-based technology creates a flexible way to integrate additional buildings as the project expands. Community-led and publicly owned, this initiative represents one hopeful model for building energy justice in frontline communities.
In addition to increasing resilience for urban communities, microgrids can also help address the unique energy challenges of rural and island communities. In Puerto Rico, efforts to develop distributed renewable energy systems are taking hold. After Hurricane Maria destroyed the island’s power grid, Puerto Ricans were left in the dark for multiple months. Subsequent storms have since plunged residents into the dark, again and again, revealing the vulnerabilities of the central grid infrastructure as climate change makes hurricanes more severe. Today, however, the small mountain town of Adjuntas is home to one promising model for local energy resilience. After relying on costly and highly polluting diesel generators for nearly half a year following Maria, local businesses and community groups came together to build a cooperatively managed community microgrid comprised of 700 solar panels with battery storage. Managed by a local non-profit, the microgrid can keep power on for 14 local businesses and community services in the town’s center during times of crisis.
These initiatives are not alone in modeling the potential for community microgrids to deliver equitable energy resilience in frontline and marginalized communities. Many others are in operation or development across the country, delivering mobile solar plus storage solutions to disaster areas, powering public housing developments, and building the energy sovereignty of tribal nations.
Looking forward: Ensuring energy justice
Communities on the frontlines of climate disaster and dealing with extended outages year after year are hungry for local resilient energy solutions. Despite the loss of federal investment in renewable energy and climate action, community microgrids offer one promising intervention for supporting energy resilience at the community scale. Solar plus storage is now proven technology with a demonstrated ability to keep the power on for local residents when the grid goes down.
Ensuring that renewable microgrid technology contributes to energy justice, however, will require analysis, organizing, and advocacy in several areas:
Equity: Extended outages and climate disasters produce disproportionate consequences for the health, safety, and economic security of marginalized communities. Ensuring these groups can easily access reliable, resilient electricity in their neighborhoods during blackouts and extreme weather represents an important step toward energy justice. An equitable approach to community microgrid deployment should prioritize neighborhoods and locales where histories of racial disinvestment, high social vulnerability, exposure to climate impacts, and a high risk of outages converge. Furthermore, involving trusted community organizations in resilience hub networks is crucial for ensuring that spaces are accessible, welcoming, and used by residents in need.
Ownership: When it comes to energy justice, ownership matters. Community microgrids reflect a range of ownership structures: they may be owned and managed by utilities, private companies, public institutions, non-profits, or some combination of these. Ensuring that community groups have a meaningful decision-making role when it comes to local energy solutions is crucial for ensuring energy projects are accountable to community needs. Furthermore, exploring successful models for public, community, and tribal ownership of distributed energy assets and infrastructure represents a key opportunity to integrate renewable energy into community wealth-building strategies. In cases where community organizations have limited ability or concerns about taking on debt, partnerships with non-profit financial institutions may provide one helpful path forward.
Policy: In many states, community microgrids face legal and regulatory barriers, including regulations that prevent transmission wires from crossing public rights of way, a lack of standards for interconnection with the grid, and uncertainty around service tariffs. Expanding community microgrids will require policy advocacy to facilitate their implementation at a larger scale. A handful of states and territories, including California, Hawaii, Maine, and Puerto Rico, have passed statutes that aim to remove such roadblocks and promote microgrid development. To build equity into state policies, states can also consider creating grant and technical assistance programs that incentivize and support microgrid development in environmental justice or socially vulnerable communities.
Funding: While the cost of solar and battery technology is becoming ever more affordable, microgrids still require significant funds throughout the project lifecycle, from feasibility studies and planning to capital, labor, and maintenance costs. Under the new administration, a number of federal funding sources able to support microgrid development are now in doubt (including Inflation Reduction Act tax credits covering up to 30-70% of the cost with direct pay in EJ communities, as well as FEMA hazard mitigation and disaster recovery grants). Identifying a suite of funding opportunities from other sources – including philanthropic and state competitive grants, state revolving loan funds, and financing from CDFIs, community credit unions, and green public banks – will be increasingly critical.
While community microgrids are not a replacement for modernizing and maintaining the main grid, nor for the broader imperative to build democratic accountability into our utilities and energy system, they represent one promising tool for building energy resilience in frontline communities. Models in which communities own and manage their own energy resources are already being built – and with strategic organizing, advocacy, and resources – more can be within reach.