As hurricanes, flooding and other extreme weather events become more frequent and intense across the United States, the nation’s power grid is increasingly vulnerable to damage, potentially leaving millions of people without heat and other essentials in life-threatening conditions.
“The grid is kind of old, and weather is arguably getting more extreme, so it’s becoming more vulnerable to weather impacts of different types because of that,” said Jordan Kern, an assistant professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University.
Much of the U.S. power grid’s infrastructure was built during the post-World War II economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. It was designed to last 40 to 50 years, but it wasn’t done under the expectation that the environment would be so volatile due to climate change, meaning large portions of the grid are operating well past their intended retirement age in unprecedented conditions.
Extreme weather events can have a wide range of effects on the grid’s infrastructure, according to Kern. High winds can snap wooden poles used for distribution lines. Flooding can damage electrical equipment on the ground. Drought can reduce water supplies for hydroelectric dams. Intense heat can overwhelm transmission line capacity and decrease the efficiency of power plants.
“The technologies that make up the electrical grid, whether they’re renewable or nonrenewable, are all vulnerable to extreme weather in their own way,” Kern said.
Between 2003 and 2012, extreme weather events caused 147 million power outages in homes and businesses across the U.S. These outages, which mostly resulted from damages to transmission lines, substations and lower level distribution lines, are estimated to have cost the economy an annual average of at least $18 billion.
Utility companies are upgrading and replacing aging infrastructure in order to strengthen their respective electrical systems — known as “grid modernization.” In fact, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the combined total spent on U.S. electricity delivery infrastructure — specifically high-voltage transmission and distribution — exceeded $1 trillion over the past two decades.
In addition to upgrading and replacing infrastructure across the grid, utilities are also implementing “hardening” measures to protect electrical equipment against storm damage, including burying transmission and distribution lines underground to guard against wind and ice damage and elevating or relocating electrical equipment to protect it from flooding.
Kern said utilities should also focus on adopting renewable energy technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and hydropower. While these technologies are susceptible to fluctuations in supply caused by extreme weather events, they play an important role in reducing the long-term damage and costs linked to global warming through their ability to offset greenhouse gas emissions.
“Increasingly, there are more tools we can use to manage variability in wind and solar on the grid,” Kern said. “Those include battery storage, greater coordination across systems, the use of forecasts and even customers changing when they use electricity”
Critics of grid modernization argue against it because it can cost billions of dollars and take years to complete. But it’s worth it, Kern said. “There’s always going to be costs associated with preparation, and consumers are responsible for paying those costs. People usually don’t want to pay more for electricity, but they also hate living without it during an outage. If we want a more resilient grid, we need to accept that it’s going to be expensive”
Kern added that while customers should be willing to pay for grid modernization, it’s vital that utilities and regulatory agencies work to ensure that marginalized, underprivileged communities aren’t disproportionately impacted by rate increases. “Utilities really shouldn’t ask people who already struggle to pay their electric bills to pay more.”
