$13M program aims to support residents in post-disaster power outages
5th July 2022 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
With Entergy’s near-monopoly of power supply in New Orleans frustrating local leaders and residents with long power outages and electrical infrastructure decay, a coalition of local faith institutions and community organizations has banded together to launch a pilot program of grass-roots, volunteer “community lighthouses” aimed at providing the type of service during disasters that Entergy has consistently failed to provide.
On Tuesday, June 28, hundreds of supporters and volunteers gathered at Household of Faith Church under the auspice of Together New Orleans, an organization birthed following the destruction caused last August by Hurricane Ida.
The Community Lighthouse Project will be a network of community-based, volunteer-run locations across New Orleans that will be able to detach from the existing power grid if and when electricity goes out during disasters.
Each location will be able to generate its own emergency power using collected energy from solar panels and backup battery storage. Each response hub will then be able to provide air-conditioning, refrigeration for medications, hot meals, Internet service and other power-dependent life-preserving services for vulnerable residents who desperately need to ride out the power outage and even survive after disasters.
At last week’s meeting, Together New Orleans leaders said the effort began about five years ago, growing from a handful of organizations into the dozens that now make up the group.
One of the group’s goals was to stop waiting for local, for-profit, monopolistic energy companies to upgrade their archaic, often dilapidated infrastructure, generation equipment and distribution systems that have repeatedly failed during and after hurricanes and other disasters, and to proactively create a community-based solution to lengthy post-disaster outages that’s driven by volunteers and community institutions.
Together New Orleans leaders also said organization members had also tired of prodding elected officials to take concrete action to address the electricity problems. The focus is on community-driven disaster preparedness, electricity-grid resilience and renewable-energy development that don’t depend on politicians and businesspeople to get their acts together.
“How does Louisiana become a world model for grid resilience and disaster response,” said the Rev. Antoine Barriere, pastor at the Household of Faith and one of the co-chairs of the assembly.
“We have to stop saying, ‘When are they going to do it,’ and start saying, ‘How can we do it?’” he added. “There’s a problem with asking questions that way. It sounds like we believe in accountability, but if it’s always ‘they,’ it leaves us powerless and passive. We are here today because we made up our minds to stop saying, ‘When are they going to do something?’”
The Rev. Shawn Anglim, pastor at First Grace United Methodist Church and an assembly co-chair, led those in attendance in a hands-on demonstration of how the Together New Orleans effort, including the lighthouse project, has grown. Beginning with the attendees from Household of Faith, representatives of each organization added to a drum beat on small hand-held drums.
As the members of each group were added to the beat one by one, the building crescendo of drums represented the way the power held within Together New Orleans gradually grew into the gathering embodied last week.
After the exercise was over, Anglim said that the gathering strength is always accepting new drummers, so to speak.
“We need more people,” he said. “We need you and your institutions to join this drumline and then we will have our world-class model.”
Several elected officials attended the assembly, including City Council members Helena Moreno and Oliver Thomas, who both said they were blown away by such a grassroots-, community-powered solution to the challenges of grid resiliency, disaster readiness and community togetherness.
“Today we really open a new chapter of hope for our community and our neighbors and a sustainable future for the city of New Orleans,” said Moreno, the Council president. “We have one of the most climate-impacted cities in the country.
“Therefore, we have to be bold, tenacious and creative with our solutions as well so that we may be able to deal with and even survive future storms to come so that we do not leave anyone behind, particularly our most vulnerable.”
When fully created and set up, the Community Lighthouse network will ensure that every city resident will be within a 15-minute walk to a response hub.
Last week’s meeting also included the announcement of several new funding sources for the project, which organizers have estimated will cost a total $13.8 million.
Speaking in a video message, Congressman Troy Carter (D-New Orleans) announced that $3.8 million toward the project has been earmarked by Congress in the legislator’s new spending bill. While Carter said the measure still needs to be OK’ed by the U.S. Senate before the funding can be disbursed and sent to Together New Orleans, he added that he fully expects that to happen soon.
Carter lauded the Community Lighthouse Project, which he said will put in place new, cutting-edge technology to serve the New Orleans community in trying times while also helping to counter climate change and create new, “green” jobs for local workers.
He said that the aftermath of Ida revealed the inadequacy in the existing electrical supply and distribution system by keeping too many local residents without power and other vital resources to the point of crisis.
“The power was out for far too long, and too many people didn’t have their air conditioning, refrigeration and power they needed to stay connected, safe and healthy after the storm,” Carter said. “This is unacceptable, and I knew I needed to help them in finding answers to these problems.
“That’s where the Community Lighthouse Project comes in,” he added, “to change the game using commercial-scale solar power and backup battery capacity and known central community spaces, to access people and deliver critical resources all powered by renewable energy. This project will invest in transformative technology to build new networks and hubs across our region.”
In addition to Carter’s announcement, city officials led by Cantrell revealed that the city will kick in $1 million for the project. Cantrell said the pilot program will add to the several other local institutions that have already been creating renewable energy advancement.
“Timing means everything,” Cantrell said. “You’re going to get your lighthouses. I have no doubt about that, because things are happening for the city of New Orleans. We have demonstrated that we know how to come back when shocks come our way.”
Moreno added that Hurricane Ida exposed the flaws in the city’s power grid, flaws that endangered hundreds of lives, proving urgent, collective progress is needed, with the Community Lighthouse Project as an example of such bold, united effort.
“If Hurricane Ida taught us anything,” she said, “it taught us we need to build centers that can sustain us for days at a time. Our future lies in these localized solutions coming from the bottom up and powered by thoughtful policy that puts people first, and like lighthouses of years past, these new centers will be powerful guides towards a future of sustainability.”
State Sen. Joseph Bouie, who also attended the June 29 gathering, said state officials are also enthusiastic about potentially pitching in, adding of the lighthouse project that “there is power in people, and what you all have done … we’re talking about God’s people, and that is real power that you have all brought to this table.”
“This piece is about to happen,” he added, “and that spirit can guarantee that [the project’s impact] will not only be institutionalized – not just for this state, this nation, this world – but it will serve our communities. It’s something that will emanate from this.”
In addition to the announcements regarding government funding, Andy Kopplin, president and CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation, told the group that the Foundation has also pledged $1 million.
He said that immediately after Ida hit, the GNOF began raising money for disaster relief and other recovery programs, and it quickly became apparent that the existing electricity grid was woefully inadequate, which led to emergency-service workers and volunteers attempting to provide help without the power they needed to do so.
“The lesson we learned is that we have to be more resilient so that our first-responding organizations have what they need to serve the people, and that’s what the Community Lighthouse Project is all about,” he said.
“When we heard this idea, it didn’t take long [to decide to provide funding],” Kopplin added. “We made our largest post-Ida hurricane grant to the Community Lighthouse program because we believed in it.”
On top of those announced funding sources, the project has also received a tax-credit investment for $3.5 million, as well as a donation of $800,000 from the Direct Relief and Episcopal Relief Services, leaving about $4.7 million left to generate for completion of the project.
Together New Orleans has garnered the support of the U.S. Department of Energy, for the lighthouse effort. In a Feb. 14 letter to Together New Orleans, the DOE stated that the organization has been chosen as one of 14 projects across the country for the Energy Storage for Social Equity program, which will provide recipients with “technical assistance for economic analysis, initial engineering work, social equity analysis, and local collaborations,” and possibly direct demonstration at some point.
The ES4SE program works with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to provide the stated government-sponsored assistance to the communities selected, with a “vision … to better understand Urban, Rural, and Tribal needs from the energy system and to explore together how energy storage can help to better supply these needs.”
ES4SE Program Manager Jen Yoshimura addressed last week’s gathering and said the lighthouse project stood out among applicants for the DOE program for its emphasis on a community-based network of resilient power hubs.
“When our team was reviewing applications, the Together New Orleans application literally jumped out [for them],” she said. “It took a tough and really challenging concept – grid resiliency – and it proposed a straightforward approach that was simple and created a solution.”
This article originally published in the July 4, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
