Marc Thomas wants to make one thing clear before he begins discussing the array of 14 photovoltaic panels on the rear roof of his Savannah home.
“This is not luxury solar power,” he stresses as butterflies flit between flowers in his pollinator-friendly backyard. “This is basic solar power, right?”
As Thomas speaks, a generator drones outside the house next door. It is four days after the remnants of Hurricane Helene tore through Savannah, and his neighborhood remains without electricity.
But the tidy one-story home the 77-year-old Thomas shares with his wife, Margo, never lost power thanks to the solar panels and accompanying battery storage.
It’s the fifth outage in the neighborhood since the system was installed in mid-April, but the Thomases’ service was never interrupted, he says.
“A couple of them we didn’t even know about until neighbors told us that the power was out the next day,” Thomas adds.
The couple moved to Savannah from Baltimore in 2011 after Marc – also an author and poet – retired from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services , where he worked in operations management.