Bermuda’s energy sector is locked in a costly, exhausting stand-off. For years, our headlines have been dominated by Supreme Court battles, public protests over solar tariffs, and growing frustration over electricity bills.

The current system forces us to choose between protecting the utility’s revenues and rewarding residents who invest in clean tech. It is a zero-sum game where everyone loses. If affluent consumers defect entirely from the grid, Belco’s customer base shrinks. That leaves a smaller pool of traditional consumers to shoulder the volatile costs of imported heavy fuel oil.

But there is a modern, tech-forward way out of this deadlock — one that lowers fuel costs, protects the utility and fairly rewards local solar pioneers.

Bermuda needs a Virtual Power Plant

What is a Virtual Power Plant? Instead of fighting distributed solar and battery set-ups, the grid should orchestrate them. A VPP uses secure, cloud-based software to link thousands of independent, household battery systems into a single, co-ordinated power reserve.

Under this hybrid framework, Bermuda transitions to a co-operative ecosystem:

1. The battery partners: solar-battery owners remain permanently connected to the grid and pay a fair, fixed base rate to maintain our physical wires. In return, they allow the utility to remotely tap into a small fraction of their stored battery capacity (eg, 20 per cent) during peak demand windows.

2. On-demand rewards: when the grid calls upon this backup power to handle an evening spike or a sudden generator trip, the homeowner is automatically paid an attractive, premium rate.

3. The utility backbone: Belco remains our essential infrastructure provider, running its heavy fuel oil generators at steady, optimal efficiency. The utility no longer has to fire up expensive, inefficient "peaker" plants when everyone turns on their air conditioning at 6pm. Instead, the software instantly draws clean, pre-stored electricity from thousands of homes across the island.

A three-way economic win

This is not experimental theory. Island grids globally are already deploying this exact architecture. Faced with severe grid instability, Puerto Rico aggregated more than 70,000 residential batteries into a massive VPP to automatically prevent rolling blackouts. Hawaii moved away from penalising solar users, choosing instead to pay homeowners premium rates to discharge their batteries when the grid needs it most.

A hybrid VPP model replaces localised friction with mutual economic incentives:

1. For solar owners: it eliminates predatory facilities fees and turns a home backup system into a passive revenue stream through premium grid-discharge payments.

2. For traditional consumers: it drives down the Fuel Adjustment Rate (FAR) by reducing the amount of expensive fuel oil the island must import. It protects lower-income households from bearing the entire structural cost of the grid alone.

3. For Belco: it provides instant access to capital-free energy storage, stabilising the network without forcing the utility into multimillion-dollar physical infrastructure investments.

The roadmap forward

We do not need to wait years for this change. The Regulatory Authority (RA) and the Ministry of Home Affairs can initiate a phased roll-out tomorrow:

1. Phase 1 (the reset): the RA invokes Section 36 of the Electricity Act 2016 to temporarily suspend the controversial unbundled solar tariff. This pauses the public backlash and allows Belco to freeze its ongoing litigation.

2. Phase 2 (the software): Belco partners with an established, off-the-shelf software provider (such as Tesla or EnergyHub) to deploy a localised management system, opening a voluntary pilot programme for existing battery owners.

3.Phase 3 (the launch): the RA codifies a new, official VPP partner tariff, turning the bi-directional payment system live.

Our energy crisis cannot be solved in a courtroom. It requires an architectural upgrade. By implementing a hybrid VPP model, Bermuda can shift from an outdated, defensive monopoly to an agile, resilient energy ecosystem. It is time to stop fighting the future and start orchestrating it.

• Eugenie Simmons is a solar customer and clean energy advocate based in Sandys