WAPA Urged by Board Chair to Develop Independent Energy Sources for Each Home

WAPA Chair, Kyle Fleming, advocates for a shift towards self-sustained energy systems in homes, aiming to enhance reliability and autonomy in the Virgin Islands' power supply

In the wake of recent struggles to maintain a steady power supply across the territory, the chair of the V.I. Water and Power Authority’s Governing Board has called on the utility to actively explore a “distributed, decentralized approach” to power.‌ Kyle Fleming, chair of WAPA’s board and the Director of the Virgin Islands Energy Office, apologized during last week’s board meeting for the “shameless plug,” but nevertheless raised the issue of having a much larger scale rollout of sustainable energy initiatives such as residential battery storage. He referenced a Vermont-based company that was facing similar challenges to WAPA - “very remote customers in their service territory, that struggle from being able to have centralized electricity delivered to the far reaches of the grid.” What Green Mountain Power has done, Mr. Fleming explained, is to “essentially deploy energy storage devices at the residential homes, which…improves the service that they’re able to deliver to those customers.”‌