NOLA.com: 'The need was very apparent': A conversation about creating community solar-power hubs
Abel Thompson and Matt Candler are helping light the way — in a very literal sense. Both are involved in the Community Lighthouse project working to equip 86 New Orleans churches and community institutions, in addition to some in other parts of the state, with solar capacity.
The project grew out of discussions following Hurricane Ida, when most deaths in the New Orleans area were due to electricity outages. So far, construction is complete at three New Orleans locations: CrescentCare Community Center, Bethlehem Lutheran Church and Broadmoor Community Church. The project remains about $11.5 million short of its $35 million funding goal, with contributions so far coming from a mix of government agencies and nonprofits.
Thompson is an organizer with the Together New Orleans coalition, which is behind the project. Candler is a volunteer with the project and a member of a church that is part of the coalition. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you explain the project and its importance?
MC: The project was inspired by conversations between and within a bunch of congregations who are members of Together New Orleans after Hurricane Ida. Each of our community members who are part of the collective have different ways of serving their communities in the good days, and different ways of serving them when a long-duration outage happens. As that has become a bigger problem around the country, the simple idea of ‘what if these facilities that we manage had solar as storage on them, so that in these moments, we could provide some very concrete resources, not just to our members, but to our neighbors.’ That was the basic idea, and I think the elegance of it does resonate with a lot of people.
AT: One thing about Ida, it wasn't trees falling on roofs that caused loss of life. Twenty-one out of 23 of the lives that were lost were caused directly by the power outages. So I think the need was very apparent, not only in New Orleans, but it’s starting to be around the country. And Community Lighthouse has really been able to act as a model that can be scalable, replicable, practical. That really puts us in a very good position to be a model for how to do resiliency around the country.
These would be community hubs, not places to sleep? Sort of cooling centers?
MC: Typically, correct, the goal is to during daylight and evening hours provide resources to the neighborhood. And one thing that's unique about the program is that each member institution has to assign members of their community to serve as neighborhood block captains. They will audit not just their membership, but the entire neighborhood footprint and make sure they go door-to-door and understand who in the neighborhood is on oxygen or who might be on a CPAP machine and who might have diabetes meds, and they will keep track of those folks and they will either get them to the facility for cooling and meds and support or they will dispatch exactly what that family needs so that they can get through and just shelter in place. And then, of course, charging for phones and other resources, food, and then just cooling off.
AT: Each facility is customized to what they do well, what the primary community needs are. Disaster response teams are embedded in each institution that will be canvassing the neighborhood, within a mile radius of the lighthouse location. Eighty-six institutions, that's the number and scale that we want to get to, so that nobody lives outside a mile of a lighthouse. So 86 gets us to that mile radius. This is going to be an iterative process. Each time we go through this, we'll get better. We're putting together the framework for disaster response right now, in the context of lighthouses. That means gathering the resources that we need, creating a system of how each lighthouse will be able to equip themselves with the resources that they need.
When you say a mile radius, are you talking about just New Orleans?
AT: Yes, there’ll be 86 in the city. This first phase will be 16 in the city. But we have six sister organizations around the state, which gives us the opportunity to spread the pilot phase out a little bit more. So we decided to add eight to that 16 which will exist in other places around the state: Caddo Parish, East Baton Rouge Parish, Alexandria, LaPlace, Lake Charles so far.