In the US Virgin Islands (USVI), a quiet virtual symphony is taking place. As increasingly extreme weather and geopolitical disruption take a toll on energy costs and islands’ energy systems, a network of residential rooftop solar and home battery storage systems is coming together to bolster grid reliability and performance.
In March 2026, the Virgin Islands Energy Office (VIEO) launched VIBES 2.0, a virtual power plant (VPP) pilot program. It doesn’t generate power but rather organizes the available energy from individual battery systems to play in perfect harmony and react within sub-seconds to the utility’s power needs. All of this takes place without any new investments in generation or power lines from the utility.
How did this come about? Back in 2024, RMI partnered with the energy office to answer a specific challenge: how can you bridge the gap between self-reliant and sometimes skeptical residents, their underutilized battery storage systems, and a struggling utility?
After Hurricane Irma in 2017, the USVI struggled to get power back online — depending on where residents were in the territory, it took three to six months to get fully restored grid power. USVI residents were increasingly frustrated and distrusted the utility or their timelines to get the grid back online for their homes and businesses. As a result, those who could afford to do so increasingly secured their own energy resilience by installing solar panels and battery backup systems. USVI residents continue to contend with an unreliable electricity supply, driving significant uptake of residential and commercial solar and battery storage.
Today in USVI, nearly one in eight homes have solar, and many residents have coupled solar with battery storage systems. In total, the islands have 30 megawatts of solar PV and over 50 megawatt-hours of battery storage. People like St Thomas’ artisan Don Schnell are a great model of what this looks like in practice: a business owner and artisan who felt he couldn’t depend on the grid for consistent, reliable energy, and so invested in rooftop solar and battery storage. Problem solved: the grid might dip, but his productivity won’t.
However, this uptake in renewable energy systems creates an interesting dichotomy. Residents with solar and batteries have access to reliable energy while those who rely only on the grid are subject to service disruptions. All while the massive 50 MWh of aggregated battery storage sits there, often full and idle, and the main grid struggles with outages and voltage dips.