Solar-powered town shines on as powerful Hurricane Ian damages surrounding areas

The Connecticut Green Bank's Solar MAP+ program acts as a "public developer" that bundles, finances, and directly develops solar projects for schools and municipalities that private developers avoid. To date, they've installed nearly 54 megawatts of solar, programmed to save $57 million in energy costs.

Home builders in the United States are producing homes up to 50% quicker with modular housing. This process involves manufacturing different parts of the home in a factory and assembling all of those parts on-site.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, Louisiana and federal officials launched an audacious $50 billion master plan to rebuild the receding coast in an effort to mitigate the effects future storms. These are expensive and massive in scale, and although success is not guaranteed, they're attracting interest from cities around the U.S., and low-lying countries like Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Moving beyond engineered “solutions” of the past, many of these efforts focus on rebuilding land through methods that mimic natural processes for building land mass and vegetation.

A small community in the mountains of North Carolina, Hot Springs, relied on a solar-powered microgrid with battery storage when the substation that supplied its power washed away in the flooding after Hurricane Helene. Microgrids like that could be a critical part of building extreme weather resilience elsewhere, too.

The nonprofit Footprint Project is helping communities in North Carolina restore electricity after Hurricane Helene by delivering and installing solar equipment donated by companies or purchased with donated funds.

Google’s Green Light project uses data from internet-connected vehicles and navigation apps to adjust the timing of traffic lights to be more responsive to real-world traffic patterns. The project is already in operation in several cities — from Hamburg to Seattle — and data in those cities suggest the system yields a 30% decrease in stop-and-go traffic at intersections.

The city of Copenhagen uses a combination of green and gray infrastructure for flood prevention. It installed more plants, ponds with pumping systems, and green roofs to collect rainfall along with a giant underground tunnel system and walls that close off areas of the city to store water.

Florida’s Babcock Ranch survived Hurricane Ian relatively unscathed thanks to years of planning and development focused on resiliency. The community’s safety features include retaining ponds to prevent flooding, streets designed to absorb rain, a solar-powered gird with a backup-battery system, and buried power lines.

The startup Rapid Radicals uses a chemical process to treat sewage much quicker than the typical biological process. It hopes to use the technology to reduce the sewage released into local lakes and rivers in Milwaukee when the system is overwhelmed by rain or snowmelt.

One of China’s many “sponge cities,” Haikou, experiences virtually no flooding after transitioning to primarily green, nature-based infrastructure instead of gray infrastructure like concrete and flood barriers. Prioritizing things like parks, wetlands, mangroves, and permeable pavement allows the city’s ground to soak up more rain.