Hurricane Ida Power Failures Prompt Calls for More Solar Energy, Tougher Grids

Damaged power lines and homes can be seen days after hurricane Ida ripped through Grand Isle, Louisiana, US, September 2, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis
Damaged power lines and homes can be seen days after hurricane Ida ripped through Grand Isle, Louisiana, US, September 2, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis
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Hurricane Ida Power Failures Prompt Calls for More Solar Energy, Tougher Grids

Damaged power lines and homes can be seen days after hurricane Ida ripped through Grand Isle, Louisiana, US, September 2, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis
Damaged power lines and homes can be seen days after hurricane Ida ripped through Grand Isle, Louisiana, US, September 2, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis

Hurricane Ida power failures prompt calls for more solar energy, tougher grids Jenel Hazlett, 61, had a choice to make with Hurricane Ida bearing down on New Orleans: stay in the city and hope for the best, or evacuate with her small “zoo” of animals in tow.

In the end Hazlett stayed put - and online - in her raised bungalow that features solar panels and a battery backup system.

Those proved a huge advantage amid power outages that initially left more than one million in the state without electricity.

“We haven’t had to chase gas like my neighbors have for their generators - the sun comes to me,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. “I don’t want to have to fool with a gas generator."

Ida’s swath of destruction across the eastern half of the United States has put renewed focus on the need for power alternatives and backups as climate-fueled extreme weather increasingly threatens centralized electrical grids.

“The solutions are in our own hands – you can just look across the street at folks who have power and those who do not,” said Monique Harden with the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, based in New Orleans.

TAX INCENTIVES
When Ida struck, it took out eight major transmission lines delivering electricity to the New Orleans metro area, after Hurricane Laura severely damaged lines last year as well.

US President Joe Biden, who trekked to Louisiana last week to assess the damage, said moving power lines below ground - a costly measure, he admitted - would be one way to build energy system resilience to worsening storms.

Wooden poles carrying electricity transmission lines can snap in hurricanes and "we know, for a fact, if (lines) are underground, they’re secure," he said.

The Biden-backed $1.2 trillion infrastructure package moving through Congress contains about $65 billion for power grid upgrades – though environmentalists say significantly more is needed to make energy systems both climate-smart and resilient.

Both changes are crucial, as continuing widespread use of oil, gas and coal for energy is driving accelerating climate change, which in turn increases the severity of hurricanes, wildfires and other energy-grid-threatening disasters, they say.

Many New Orleans residents have invested in home solar systems, but the upfront cost of such systems - even though they then provide cheap energy - keeps too many people from following Hazlett's lead.

While the costs of home solar installations are swiftly falling as their use becomes more widespread, US federal tax credits to help pay the costs are also declining.

A 30% tax credit in recent years has now fallen to 26% for systems installed after 2019 and is set to decline further, though congressional Democrats are in the midst of an aggressive push to extend or expand such breaks.

Hazlett said the tax incentives were a big reason she could afford her system.

“When I put my solar panels up, I only paid for 20% of them – it was what allowed me to put the panels on the house,” she said.

The state of Louisiana has also moved in recent years to scale back the practice of 'net metering', which gives those operating solar panels energy bill credits for excess power they feed into the grid.

Wider use of renewable energy and resilient small-scale energy "microgrids", and expanded numbers of power transmission lines could have helped people weather Hurricane Ida better, said Daniel Tait of the Energy and Policy Institute, a US watchdog group.

“New Orleans is in the crosshairs of climate change and hurricanes – it has been and it will be," he said. "But more distributed infrastructure can help reduce the impact."

UTILITY SCRUTINY
Initial electricity outages in the US Gulf Coast region after Ida swiftly spurred renewed scrutiny of Entergy Corporation, Louisiana's largest utility, and its efforts to bolster the electric system against storms.

One challenge is that multiple bodies of water - Lake Pontchartrain, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi River - limit the corridors available for adding transmission lines.

More lines could help ensure at least some power gets through after increasingly powerful storms.

The company also has asked regulators to approve more than $500 million to repair and rebuild transmission lines damaged by 2020 hurricanes.

An Entergy spokesperson did not respond to questions about why its transmission lines failed in the most recent storm, but the company has defended its response and recovery efforts in the aftermath.

“The reason the lights are out is not because we aren’t building a resilient system,” Rod West, Entergy’s group president of utility operations, said last week.

“The lights are out because Mother Nature is still the undisputed, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world."

Still, power grids across the United States appear increasingly vulnerable as climate-fueled extreme weather events accelerate across the country.

In February, a major cold snap crippled Texas’s grid, knocking out power to more than 4 million residents and contributing to dozens of deaths , officials said.

“How many people were having to burn anything they could because they didn’t have fuel... or they didn’t have a generator at all and just burned stuff to keep warm?” Tait asked.

He said the Texas blackout highlighted safety issues from carbon monoxide when residents turn to to gas-powered generators - rather than solar or wind power - to keep the lights on.

The Louisiana Department of Health said there have been at least four deaths and more than 140 emergency department visits in about the last week tied to carbon monoxide poisoning, though it’s unclear how many are directly related to generator use after Ida.

Farther west, Pacific Gas & Electric shut off power for about 48,000 California customers last month as a planned safety measure when wildfires threatened the Golden State’s power grid.

Hazlett, of New Orleans, said a more robust electricity grid, along with properly tailored tax credits for renewables, should be part of the discussion on building resilience to storm threats moving forward.

“Something’s got to change with the way tax credits are done in order to incentivize distributed generation of clean energy,” she said. “And (it's) quiet energy – my God, those generators are awful."



Things to Know About the UN Special Rapporteur Sanctioned by the US

Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, talks to the media during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, July 11, 2023. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File)
Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, talks to the media during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, July 11, 2023. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File)
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Things to Know About the UN Special Rapporteur Sanctioned by the US

Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, talks to the media during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, July 11, 2023. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File)
Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, talks to the media during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, July 11, 2023. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File)

A UN special rapporteur was sanctioned by the United States over her work as an independent investigator scrutinizing human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, a high-profile role in a network of experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Francesca Albanese is among the experts chosen by the 47-member council in Geneva. They report to the body as a means of monitoring human rights records in various countries and the global observance of specific rights.

Special rapporteurs don't represent the UN and have no formal authority. Still, their reports can step up pressure on countries, while their findings inform prosecutors at the International Criminal Court and other venues working on transnational justice cases.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement announcing sanctions against Albanese on Wednesday that she “has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel and the West.”

Albanese said Thursday that she believed the sanctions were “calculated to weaken my mission.” She said at a news conference in Slovenia that “I’ll continue to do what I have to do.”

She questioned why she had been sanctioned — “for having exposed a genocide? For having denounced the system? They never challenged me on the facts.”

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, called for a “prompt reversal” of the US sanctions. He added that “even in face of fierce disagreement, UN member states should engage substantively and constructively, rather than resort to punitive measures.”

Prominent expert

Albanese, an Italian human rights lawyer, has developed an unusually high profile as the special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, a post she has held since May 2022.

Last week, she named several large US companies among those aiding Israel as it fights a war with Hamas in Gaza, saying her report “shows why Israel’s genocide continues: because it is lucrative for many.”

Israel has long had a rocky relationship with the Human Rights Council, Albanese and previous rapporteurs, accusing them of bias. It has refused to cooperate with a special “Commission of Inquiry” established following a 2021 conflict with Hamas.

Albanese has been vocal about what she describes as a genocide by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel and the US, which provides military support to its close ally, have strongly denied the accusation.

‘Nothing justifies what Israel is doing’

In recent weeks, Albanese issued a series of letters urging other countries to pressure Israel, including through sanctions, to end its deadly bombardment of the Gaza Strip. She also has been a strong supporter of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for allegations of war crimes.

Albanese said at a news conference last year that she has “always been attacked since the very beginning of my mandate,” adding that criticism wouldn't force her to step down.

“It just infuriates me, it pisses me off, of course it does, but then it creates even more pressure not to step back,” she said. “Human rights work is first and foremost amplifying the voice of people who are not heard.”

She added that “of course, one condemned Hamas — how not to condemn Hamas? But at the same time, nothing justifies what Israel is doing.”

Albanese became an affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University in 2015, and has taught and lectured in recent years at various universities in Europe and the Middle East. She also has written publications and opinions on Palestinian issues.

Albanese worked between 2003 and 2013 with arms of the UN, including the legal affairs department of the UN Palestinian aid agency, UNRWA, and the UN human rights office, according to her biography on the Georgetown website.

She was in Washington between 2013 and 2015 and worked for an American nongovernmental organization, Project Concern International, as an adviser on protection issues during an Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Member of a small group

Albanese is one of 14 current council-appointed experts on specific countries and territories.

Special rapporteurs, who document rights violations and abuses, usually have renewable mandates of one year and generally work without the support of the country under investigation. There are rapporteurs for Afghanistan, Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, North Korea, Eritrea, Iran, Myanmar, Russia and Syria.

There also are three country-specific “independent experts,” a role more focused on technical assistance, for the Central African Republic, Mali and Somalia.

Additionally, there are several dozen “thematic mandates,” which task experts or working groups to analyze phenomena related to particular human rights. Those include special rapporteurs on “torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” the human rights of migrants, the elimination of discrimination against people affected by leprosy and the sale, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children.