Her Solar Panels Survived 180mph Winds. Her Whole Street Ran on Them After

• Jennifer Hue’s solar panels survived Melissa intact
• Neighbours charged phones and used her fridge for days
• Rooftop solar grew from 1.4MW to nearly 65MW since 2015
• Renewables made up about 10% of Jamaica’s power before the storm

The morning after Hurricane Melissa tore through Jamaica with 180 mph winds, retired tax auditor Jennifer Hue, living near hard-hit Treasure Beach, woke up to real devastation, her mango, breadfruit and papaya trees snapped off at the top, water everywhere. Her roof held, and so did the solar panels she had installed two years earlier. Most of her neighbours had no electricity at all. She did.

The panels turned her property into an informal power hub for the surrounding community in the storm’s immediate aftermath. Neighbours came by to charge phones, take a cool drink from her working refrigerator, and message loved ones to confirm they were safe. Weeks later, she was still hosting a cousin and his mother, along with two medical students whose own accommodation had been damaged. The wind was like a tornado, and water came through every crevice, Hue said. But we didn’t lose any solar panels, and the next morning, the sun was shining bright and early. We had our power back.

Hue’s experience reflects a genuine, measurable shift in Jamaica’s energy mix over the past decade rather than an isolated stroke of luck. Rooftop solar capacity grew from less than 1.4 megawatts in 2015 to nearly 65 megawatts in 2023, with solar and other renewables making up roughly 10 percent of Jamaica’s total power generation before Melissa struck, a small but genuinely significant share for an island whose electricity, reliant on imported oil and gas, ranks among the most expensive in the world per kilowatt-hour.

What Hue’s story adds to that broader energy-transition narrative is a resilience case rather than just a cost-savings one. Solar power in hurricane-prone regions has typically been sold on lower bills and energy independence from imported fuel; her panels surviving a Category 5 storm intact, while the surrounding grid failed entirely, demonstrates a second, arguably more urgent argument for the same technology: not just cheaper power, but power that actually keeps working when a hurricane knocks everything else out.

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