The first time I visited Bermuda in 2018, I drove an electric vehicle for the first time. It was a Renault Twizy, which struck me as a vehicle that made more sense in Bermuda than almost anywhere else. The distances are short, the speed limits are modest and electric motors are well suited to the island's hills because of the torque they produce. That experience stayed with me and Bermuda reinforced it through 70 electric public buses operating across the island.

Despite that strong and early start, we have not moved nearly as aggressively as we could. I do not see energy as another line item on a household budget; it is an enabler of almost every part of the economy, whether we are talking about refrigeration, air-conditioning, telecommunications, restaurants, construction, transportation or simply keeping a house dry and comfortable. When electricity is unusually expensive, that cost quickly finds its way into almost everything else people buy.

Two recent utility bills that crossed my desk illustrate the problem. A residential account using 1,299 kilowatt-hours incurred $685.08 in current electricity charges, nearly 53 cents per kilowatt-hour. A commercial account using 2,673 kilowatt-hours incurred $1,278.25, or almost 48 cents per kilowatt-hour. Crucially, $179.05 of the residential bill and $380.26 of the commercial bill were attributable to the fuel adjustment alone.

A meaningful proportion of what Bermudians pay each month is tied directly to purchasing fuel overseas and transporting it here. Bermuda cannot control international oil prices, conflicts overseas or disruptions to global shipping but it can determine how dependent its economy remains on all three.

There is also a health dimension. Bermuda's climate means controlling humidity is a necessity, yet doing so requires electricity for air-conditioning, ventilation and dehumidification. It is easy to understand why people are reluctant to run a dehumidifier continuously when electricity costs so much. Damp and mouldy buildings are associated with respiratory symptoms and worsening asthma, so energy affordability affects the quality of the indoor environment as well.

There are already sensible policies in place. Fully electric vehicles are subject to zero customs duty, as are solar panels and much of the equipment associated with renewable-energy installations.

What is missing is an effort to turn those individual incentives into something national in scale, with the same sustained drive France pursued after the 1973 oil crisis when it rapidly expanded nuclear generation to reduce exposure to imported energy.

Floating solar can solve a large part of the problem. The difficulty is that flotation systems, marine anchoring, subsea connections, corrosion resistance and hurricane survivability add substantial cost. Bermuda already possesses tens of thousands of potential solar surfaces in the form of residential and commercial roofs, so it makes more sense to use those first.

Government statistics record approximately 33,000 residential units across Bermuda. Not every building will have an ideal roof, but if perhaps 29,000 homes eventually received standardised six-kilowatt solar installations, that would amount to roughly 174 megawatts of distributed generation.

Under reasonable Bermuda solar-production assumptions, such a network could produce around 250 million kilowatt-hours each year, just shy of half the island's electricity consumption and enough to offset most residential demand.

This should not be approached as 29,000 unrelated retail projects. Bermuda is small enough to standardise the process, procure panels and inverters in enormous quantities, train local installation crews and work through the island in an organised manner. At a targeted installed cost of approximately $2 to $2.50 per watt, a programme of this scale would cost between $350 million and $435 million.

That is unquestionably a large capital investment but it should be compared with continuing to spend substantial sums every year importing fuel that is burnt, its remnants landing in the ocean.

Much of the battery capacity could be installed at substations and other strategic locations, where utility-scale systems can be purchased and maintained more economically, while individual households could still add batteries for hurricane resilience and back-up power.

A heavily distributed energy system does not make the grid less important. In fact it makes reliable substations, engineers and system operators more important because electricity must still be balanced and moved around the island. What changes is the origin of that electricity and the amount of imported fuel required to produce it.

Bermuda does not have Norway’s North Sea oil, but it does possess something equally impossible to import or take away from us: a considerable amount of sunlight falling on the island every day. The opportunity now is to build the economic infrastructure capable of reducing the cost of living, improving resilience and keeping more of Bermuda's money in Bermuda.

• Zlatko Zahirovic is the cofounder and chief technology officer of Paradise Mobile and deputy chairman of the GSMA North America Terminals Working Group