The U.S. power grid isn’t prepared for severe weather. This vulnerability will become more acute as climate change worsens extremes and if the grid doesn’t adjust to managing more renewable energy.
This summer is reflective of the tensions extreme weather is bringing to bear on the electricity system. Last month, grid operators in both Texas and California asked people to conserve power, fearful of having to impose outages on high-demand hot summer days. In addition, California energy regulators announced on July 1 they would procure additional energy resources from out of state throughout the summer to ensure the lights stay on.
The pleas from California and Texas regulators came less than a year after those states experienced blackouts — California last summer during wildfire season and Texas in February during a rare cold snap. Recent unprecedented heat in the Pacific Northwest is putting a strain on the electricity grid, too.
Climate and weather “is the most influential and impactful force that grid planners and operators have to deal with,” said John Moura, director of reliability assessment and performance analysis for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, a regulatory agency focused on grid stability and security.
Recently, though, “the grid has more than ever been exposed to these extreme conditions,” such as heat waves, drought, flooding, and prolonged freezing temperatures, he said. He added that the effect of those extremes on reliability is more significant as the grid shifts to more weather-dependent resources.
NERC released a report in May showing that the West, Texas, the Midwest, and New England face an elevated risk of energy emergencies during periods of peak summer demand this year.
Heat waves and other extreme weather can both sharply increase electricity demand and force energy generators offline.
For example, heat can reduce the efficiency of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants by 5% to 10%, said Michael Goggin, vice president of Grid Strategies. Power plants can also fail in extreme cold, especially if, like in Texas, the facilities aren’t weatherized to withstand freezing temperatures.
The U.S. energy mix has also been rapidly changing due to market forces and ambitious climate goals bringing in more cheap gas and renewables. But unfortunately, the electricity grid’s infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with those changes.
Energy analysts say a big part of the solution is to build more, including generating resources and especially electric transmission to connect power sources to population centers.
More transmission can make “the grid bigger than the weather,” Goggin said, allowing resources to be better shared across the entire country. “That helps with these extreme weather events, but also the everyday operation of the grid with large amounts of wind and solar.”
The Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure deal offers $73 billion for electric transmission, but energy experts say more is needed, including breaking down barriers to building the power lines.
“You can spend all the money in the world on incentivizing the construction of a transmission line, but if there is a local community that doesn’t want it going through their land, they can tie it up for decades,” said Ken Medlock, senior director of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy’s Center for Energy Studies.
“In many ways, there needs to be a reconciliation of how much money we allocate, how it gets spent, and how it gets spent responsibly,” including working closely to get buy-in from local communities, he added.
Equally as critical is ensuring states aren’t retiring plants before there is enough guaranteed power to replace them.
“When you retire a 200-megawatt coal plant, and you replace that with 200 one-megawatt wind turbines, that doesn’t equal. There are things that you don’t have that you did with the coal unit, including the assurance and availability of coal,” Moura said.
“We’re not shying away from the transition,” he added. “We just want it to be done reliably.”
