Solar Resilience: Engineering Utility-Scale Grids for Any Future
Solar resilience is the ability of solar power systems, especially when paired with battery storage, to provide continuous, reliable electricity during grid outages, protecting homes, businesses, and communities from blackouts. By generating and storing power locally, it allows systems to "island" or disconnect from the grid during disruptions, keeping critical services running and enabling rapid recovery after events.
In April 2025, Spain and Portugal experienced a massive blackout that left much of the Iberian Peninsula without power for nearly a full day. The incident disrupted telecommunication and transportation systems across both countries, leading to multiple injuries and even several deaths.
In the wake of the blackout, some pundits seized on the opportunity to blame a growing reliance on renewables as the reason for the outage. While anyone with even a passing interest in energy production or engineering could easily dismiss such bogus science, many people were quick to accept that the ever-present boogeyman of “green energy” had struck again.
Even though authorities in both nations have since refuted the claim, it remains a potent talking point in the quest to “protect the grid” from “unreliable” renewable power. But what really failed Portugal and Spain wasn’t the type of energy going into the grid. It was the grid itself.
Due to technical issues and “miscalculations,” a power surge had led to a series of cascading failures, triggering a chain reaction of shutdowns. While there’s clearly a lesson there, it doesn’t have anything to do with renewables.
Or perhaps it does?
Understand “The Grid”
When we talk about the "power grid," we're referring to a massive, interconnected network of power plants, transmission systems, substations, and thousands of miles of power lines. It’s essentially the circulatory system of modern civilization, but most people don’t really understand it. In the United States, the grid” has been a part of everyday life going back to the New Deal, and this omnipresence has given many Americans an incorrect impression of its durability.
The truth is that the U.S. electrical grid is under immense pressure from the changing world around us. From record-breaking heatwaves to sophisticated cyberattacks, today's grid faces threats that its 20th-century architecture was never built to withstand. And contrary to all the claims about renewables seen in the wake of the Iberian Peninsula Blackout, it’s actually the reliance on centralized fossil-fueled infrastructure that poses the risk.
In this changing landscape, solar energy is proving not just viable but vital. As Doman Energy’s Vice President, Aaron Burkhart, often states, “Solar resilience is grid resilience.” And in an age of increasing instability, that kind of resilience is non-negotiable. By combining photovoltaic power stations with smart storage and distributed systems, solar engineers are building a grid designed to endure whatever comes next.
Turning Weak Points into Strengths
For decades, “reliability” has been synonymous with traditional fossil-fueled power plants. In reality, centralized grids like these are inherently fragile, especially in a world of growing extremes. As a result, a single failure at a coal plant, gas pipeline, or high-voltage substation can ripple across entire regions, taking down millions of homes and critical infrastructure in minutes.
This is precisely what Spanish and Portuguese authorities think caused the April blackout. At some point, the system experienced an as-yet-unexplained surge in voltage. And while investigations into what failed and why are still ongoing, officials in both nations have seized the opportunity to raise concerns about grid stability. This comes after a number of events in the U.S., including the California wildfires, Gulf Coast hurricanes, and the infamous Texas freeze of 2021, had already led to widespread doubts.
If centralized grids lead to increased vulnerability, distributed systems lead to resilience. And since building coal and nuclear plants is neither cheap nor simple, the best option for generating energy close to where it is used is solar, wind, and other types of renewable energy. These distributed systems represent a fundamental shift toward local generation and, by design, local control.
Whether this comes in the form of larger, utility-scale solar farms or smaller clusters of panels, generating energy closer to the point of consumption reduces strain on the transmission grid and mitigates regional risks. These systems can not only scale up or down as needed, but connections to state-of-the-art battery solutions mean that even severe interruptions will not result in a total loss of power.
Today’s BESS units can provide instantaneous backup, stabilize frequency, and even perform a black start, the term for restarting grid segments after a complete outage without relying on an external power network. This is absolutely critical for facilities like hospitals, military installations, and emergency shelters, where downtime isn’t an option. Combined with decentralized solar, BESS offers what legacy grids never could: clean, predictable, and highly flexible resilience.
Combining Solar, Storage, and Smart Systems
The grid of the future won’t just be cleaner, it will also be smarter and more self-reliant. For example, microgrids built around solar and BESS are already operating independently from the central grid in remote and disaster-prone areas.
Blue Lake Rancheria, a tribal community in Northern California, has constructed a microgrid around its hotel and casino, designed to “island” itself during wildfire-related grid shutdowns. Following the devastation of Hurricane Maria, Toro Negro, a remote mountain community in Puerto Rico, installed roughly 600 panels and 300 lead-acid batteries to keep the lights on in the event of future storms. On Ta‘ū Island, American Samoa, the entire community of 600 residents has been able to forgo diesel in exchange for a solar-battery microgrid.
In a decentralized grid system, solutions like these could be applied to individual businesses, city blocks, or small towns. In the event that power is cut off from the outside, they would be able to power themselves and each other, with seemingly no break in service.
But that only describes what’s possible with past technology. Now, artificial Intelligence and machine learning are being integrated into these systems to aid with predictive energy management. This enables systems large and small to adjust in real-time based on forecasted weather, demand surges, and supply anomalies. In the future, custom location specifications could effectively account for things like fire zones, flood risks, extreme heat, and even salt corrosion.
In a world of rising extremes, the new, resilient grid would be able to survive and thrive under pressure.
Engineering Resilience from the Ground Up
Doman Energy knows all about resilience. The firm’s “Engineering First” approach ensures that each project is purpose-built to perform, from environmental assessments to final system commissioning. Since the early 2000s, the firm has delivered photovoltaic power stations across North America, focusing on utility-scale solar projects that prioritize efficiency and cost reduction.
According to Burkhart, BESS technology has been key to giving solar the power to fight the problems inherent in centralized power systems. “For years, the solar industry has focused on attaching projects to the central grid, but that’s only because battery technology was yet to catch up with us. But now it has. With a BESS system, you can have on-demand direct power capability. Whether the grid goes down or you simply have peak points in the day where everyone turns on their AC, you have stored power to help mitigate it.”
As the risk of centralized traditional energy systems faltering increases, solar engineers are stepping up to provide a more flexible, durable, and intelligent alternative. “It’s no longer just about going green,” Burkhart says. “It’s about powering through uncertainty.