On June 5, 2025, a severe hailstorm tore through West Texas. The National Weather Service in Lubbock documented the outbreak as a major severe weather event. Public meteorological reporting for the broader event recorded hailstones as large as five inches near Lubbock, according to the report. The solar arrays that came through undamaged were not the ones in the best location. They were the ones whose panels had tilted to 60 degrees before the hail arrived.
That outcome is one of five case studies in the Resilient Power Report 2026, published this month by kWh Analytics, a Beazley company. The report draws on the experiences of five renewable energy asset operators: Clearway Energy Group, Madison Energy Infrastructure, Nextpower, Deriva Energy, and the National Laboratory of the Rockies. It documents how specific engineering and operational decisions affected both physical outcomes and insurance consequences.
The hail case study involves Clearway’s 452 MW Texas Solar Nova portfolio near Lubbock, home to more than one million solar modules. Automated hail-stow technology, using Nextpower’s NX Horizon trackers, tilted every panel to its steepest angle before impact. Following the storm, Clearway found fewer than 200 damaged modules out of 1,097,778 installed, less than 0.018%, and filed zero insurance claims. Nearby service vehicles, by contrast, sustained broken windshields and battered hoods.
The design comparison from Guam makes the same point from a different angle. After Category 4 Typhoon Mawar struck the island in May 2023, engineers from the National Laboratory of the Rockies assessed 29 rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) systems across Guam. Two adjacent systems at the same school, subject to identical wind speeds of approximately 111 mph, experienced dramatically different outcomes.
The difference was not location or exposure. It was clamps. Sites using one racking manufacturer averaged just 3% damage across 17 installations. Sites using rail-mounted clamps of a different design, meanwhile, averaged 54% damage across three sites. One clamp type could rotate loose under wind vibration and release two adjacent modules simultaneously. The other was bolted directly into the support structure and held.
The battery energy storage system (BESS) case study is the most direct illustration of how engineering choices feed through to coverage. A solar and storage asset owner with more than $100 million invested in a BESS discovered a known HVAC failure mode after the original manufacturer could no longer provide engineering support. Two failure paths ran through the fleet: undersized cooling systems causing heat buildup and eventual electrical arcing, and water ingress through HVAC condensation.
Either could cascade into thermal runaway, a scenario where chemical energy release burns through an entire row of battery containers. The failure mode is not rare: battery analytics firm PowerUp, contributing to kWh Analytics’ companion 2026 Solar Risk Assessment, reported that 75% of utility-scale BESS sites it analyzed showed early signals of HVAC-related thermal anomalies, across a dataset of eight sites totalling 596 MWh. kWh Analytics estimated the unchecked risk at an eight-figure insured loss from a single event.
The asset owner’s response was to install single-use fuses between battery modules throughout each chain, so a fault in one module would be isolated before spreading, and to adjust charge-discharge cycling to give HVAC systems time to cool. kWh Analytics modeled those measures as cutting the expected loss from a thermal event by approximately 95%. More immediately, the report notes that insurance carriers had been unwilling to bear the original risk without manufacturer support in place. After mitigation, the asset secured a property insurance renewal without deterioration in terms.
That sequence of uninsurable risk, targeted engineering response, and coverage restored is the practical frame the report is built around, and it tracks with what underwriters have been signaling more broadly. Rob Hale, global power and renewable energy leader at Willis Natural Resources, said in the firm’s June 2026 Renewable Energy Market Review that competitive advantage is shifting toward projects that can demonstrate strong engineering standards, robust maintenance practices, and data-driven risk insights. BESS fire risk in particular continues to influence insurer appetite on a project-by-project basis, the review found.
The report’s remaining two case studies focus on protocol rather than hardware. When Winter Storm Fern crossed the eastern US in January 2026, Madison Energy Infrastructure returned 6 MW of solar capacity to service across five states approximately 10 days sooner than natural snowmelt would have allowed, by pre-positioning panels remotely and using snowmelt modeling to decide where manual clearing would generate a positive return. Of 405 affected sites, 398 showed no financial case for intervention, underscoring that knowing when not to act is as valuable as recovering capacity quickly.
Deriva Energy’s wildfire case study describes a utility-scale renewable facility in the path of an active fire. Deriva’s 24/7, NERC-compliant Remote Operations Center coordinated a proactive de-energization of the site. The controlled shutdown followed established operating procedures, with every decision time-stamped as it occurred. The facility was restored without damage once conditions improved.
“Technologies and protocols that weren’t in place just a few years ago are now operational,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics. “As renewables become the backbone of the grid, working together to scale those solutions will be key to building lasting, resilient infrastructure.”
The Resilient Power Report 2026 is a companion to kWh Analytics’ annual Solar Risk Assessment and draws on BESS and PV operational risk findings the company has tracked across its portfolio. The case studies are self-reported by the contributing operators and have not been independently peer reviewed.
