Renewable energy developers may be building solutions to the climate crisis, but as Hurricane Helene showed, they aren’t immune from its impacts.

When the storm hammered North Carolina last month, Ben Catt’s first thoughts were of his staff. His company, the solar farm developer Pine Gate Renewables, is based in Asheville: With power and cell networks down, it took Catt four days to contact all 100 of his employees, some of whose homes were destroyed completely. Catt’s own house was damaged by a fallen tree. Then he started receiving reports from his engineers: About 20 of the company’s solar fields, one-fifth of its fleet, were damaged and offline.

“So much electrical equipment is ground-mounted that if you get significant flooding, you can take out wide swaths of it,” he said.

All but one of those sites are back online as of this week, Catt said (the last is held up by broader damage to the nearby electric grid). But the fallout will hurt the company financially, and won’t be entirely covered by insurance.

“Our industry, at the scale we’re working at now, is very new,” he said. “All of the other industries that support us, in our supply chains and other services, still need to mature with us, and insurance is no exception.”