In the US Virgin Islands, rooftop solar and batteries form a network of shared infrastructure—and a model of energy resilience for isolated grids.
Donald Schnell runs a small pottery shop on St Thomas, opening his doors early each morning to serve local customers. For many years, keeping the business running has meant working around an unreliable power supply.
Back in 1975, when Donald moved to the island to open his shop, he quickly learned that on St Thomas, energy arrives by boat. Diesel fuel, shipped in at great cost, has powered homes, businesses and hospitals for decades. Small, isolated electricity grids and ageing infrastructure leave the US Virgin Islands acutely exposed to storms and supply disruptions. Hurricanes are a constant threat, capable of crippling power systems and cutting communities off from electricity for months at a time.
Across the Caribbean’s climate-vulnerable islands, dependence on imported fuel for energy is an expensive habit. It ties their economies to volatile global fuel markets, drains foreign-exchange reserves and leaves essential services exposed whenever shipments are delayed. For St Thomas and the wider territory, relying on a single imported fuel is becoming increasingly untenable.
High electricity bills and ongoing doubts about the grid’s reliability are pushing residents and businesses to look for alternatives. Solar panels and battery storage offer a way to take control—keeping the lights on during outages and softening the impact of future disruptions.
Individually, these systems give households security. Collectively, they form a virtual power plant (VPP), a network of stored energy spread across the islands.
VPPs link together thousands of home batteries, rooftop solar systems and smart inverters so they work as one large, intelligent energy resource. Co-ordinated in real time, this shared system helps to keep the grid stable by supplying extra power when it is needed and smoothing out fluctuations across the territory. When demand spikes or the grid is strained, stored energy can be dispatched back to the system in milliseconds. For participants, this turns passive ownership into active contribution.
VPPs offer rapid, flexible deployment compared with traditional generation. New fossil fuel-powered plants typically require years to plan, permit and build, whereas VPPs can be brought online in months and reconfigured as grid needs evolve.
Supported by rebate programmes, thousands of households and businesses have invested in their own systems, initially as backup power, but increasingly as a more dependable way to meet everyday energy needs. In doing so, residents are not simply protecting themselves from outages. By sharing stored energy with the grid, they provide valuable services and are compensated for this, turning resilience into a revenue stream.
What emerges is a participatory energy economy. For a territory long exposed to volatile imported fuel costs and external supply shocks, shifting towards locally generated and stored power strengthens energy security and gives households and businesses greater control over their energy future.
For island energy systems across the Caribbean, this marks an important inflection point. Distributed energy is no longer confined to pilot schemes or post-disaster backup, but is proving capable of operating at scale, co-ordinating thousands of small assets into something that behaves like core grid infrastructure.
For example, in Puerto Rico, batteries from more than 80,000 households have already been aggregated into VPP-style networks, with the support of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a think-tank. What began as household-level resilience has become a system-level asset, showing how quickly island grids can mobilise distributed energy when policy, finance and technology align.
The Puerto Rico experience offers a working proof of concept. Islands with limited land, isolated grids and high exposure to fuel price volatility can build resilience from the bottom up, with communities becoming active partners in the energy system. VPPs allow energy systems to grow incrementally—home by home, business by business—without the long lead times or capital intensity of conventional generation.
Solving the energy trilemma requires companies to focus on resilience and reinvent how they operate, using technology and cross‑sector collaboration to deliver reliable, affordable and secure energy for all.
After decades of diesel dependence, the US Virgin Islands is building power systems that are cleaner and more resilient. This energy autonomy is bringing resilience and economic returns to businesses, like Donald’s, and communities throughout the Caribbean and far beyond. Today, VPPs operate everywhere from Texas to Tokyo. For remote communities, connecting people to power is one essential step; connecting people to essential resources is another. In places where distance determines treatment from tragedy, new technologies are rewriting what's possible.
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