Designing for the future: power grids must adapt to climate change
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by KATHERINE SYPHER | Oct. 4, 2021
Editor’s note: This article is part of a collaboration between APM Research Lab and the Ten Across initiative, housed at Arizona State University.
The country’s stressed and aging electrical infrastructure was built for the climate of the past, experts say.
Wildfires, heat, drought, cold and severe storms—extreme weather fueled by the changing climate—can disrupt and even destroy power grids. Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and the winter storm in Texas are among the recent examples of extreme weather leading to power grid failure, in turn leading to loss of livelihoods and lives.
And as the 2020 census showed, populations in urban areas are growing, and with them so too will grow the demand on electrical grids.
“The problem,” said Mikhail Chester, an associate professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering at Arizona State University, “is that climate is changing faster than our infrastructure.”
To catch up with the rapid pace of the changing climate, power grids and the way we think about them need an upgrade, not just to prepare for the disasters of today but in preparation for those in the decades to come.
According to an APM Research Lab analysis, nearly half of the weather-caused power outages in 2020 occurred in just eight states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and New Mexico.
In the United States, 96% percent of power outages in 2020 were caused by severe weather or natural disasters. In the Ten Across region, more than seven in 10 outages were caused by severe weather or natural disaster. Those outages affected 90% of customers in the eight states, over 12 million in all.
The impact of severe weather on power infrastructure has only gotten worse. According to an analysis by Climate Central, there was 67% increase in major power outages from weather-related events between 2000 and 2019 nationally.
Many power grid failures last for several hours and even several weeks—ample time to impact health and safety.
Severe weather and natural disasters come in different forms, each with its own particular method of exposing weaknesses in electrical systems. Three of those major influences—heat, cold and severe storms—are impacting cities in the South and Southwest and have the potential to only do more damage in the future.
Heat, for example, can overpower electrical lines and make power plants inefficient. Drought can lower water levels and limit the ability of hydroelectric dams to generate electricity. And as temperatures rise, people turn up the dials on their air conditioning, stressing the system further.
A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Arizona State University, and University of Guelph recently simulated what would happen if a heat wave and grid failure occurred at the same time. Their models suggested that in Phoenix—one of the nation’s hottest cities, where over 99% of residences are estimated to have central air conditioning—a heat wave where indoor temperatures reached over 100 degrees combined with a five-day blackout could result in the illness or death of over 1.6 million people.
Mikhail Chester, Ph.D. Photo courtesy of Arizona State University.
“The interesting thing about electricity is that it’s both a supply and demand problem,” Chester said. “When it’s hot, the capability of the power system to supply electricity gets constrained, but demand at the same time goes up. So, these two things are at odds with each other.”
Cold temperatures, caused by a winter storm, created supply and demand problems last winter in Texas. Temperatures reached record below-zero lows in some cities and 4.5 million customers across the state were left without power. According to an investigation by Buzzfeed News, the storm and resulting power losses likely killed approximately 700 people. Power plants across the state weren’t prepared for the extreme winter conditions—parts failed, pipes froze and entire facilities went offline.
Thomas Overbye, Ph.D. Photo courtesy of Thomas Overbye.
“It doesn’t matter if you have a smart meter or a great transmission line,” said Thomas Overbye, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University. “We did not have enough [power] generation.”
Hurricanes remain one of the greatest threats to electrical grids. Sea level rise threatens to swamp coastal power plants and substations. High winds can break electrical poles and tangle trees in power lines and flooding can drown electrical equipment. And major storms keep coming, continually having devastating effects on electrical grids.
“I’ve been waiting for any of these events, as heartbreaking as they are, to act as a trigger for a paradigm shift and I’m not sure we’ve seen that,” said Roshi Nateghi, an associate professor of industrial engineering at Purdue University. “We keep getting blindsided.”
Research published in Nature Climate Change last year found that climate and weather events can also compound and create a much bigger effect than they would have otherwise. Last month, dozens of people died when Hurricane Ida hit the Louisiana coast, many in the days following the storm when power lines were down and temperatures rose above 90 degrees.
Roshi Nateghi, Ph.D. Photo courtesy of Purdue University.
Disasters also have disproportionate impacts on marginalized communities, such as low-income communities and communities of color. Nateghi’s research has focused not just on how to restore the grid to its former state after a disaster, but to improve it and make it more resilient.
“I think many people think of resilience as restoring access as fast as possible, but doing so equitably is actually the challenge,” Nateghi said. “Building back to what was [there] before doesn’t necessarily work for many communities.”
Grid Design
According to researchers, grid operators have a track record of underestimating the changes in electricity demand that extreme weather can cause.
Typically power grids have been designed and built using decades of data looking backwards in time at climate variability in a given place. But decades ago, many places weren’t experiencing the same weather extremes they’re seeing now, or at least with the same frequency.
Clark Miller, Ph.D. Photo courtesy of Clark Miller.
“What climate change is doing,” said Clark Miller, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, “[is] it’s changing the statistical parameters of these weather events and weather extremes … and they’re interacting with infrastructures that were built for different weather and climate statistics than they’re now experiencing.”
Experts who spoke with the APM Research Lab emphasized that utilities need to rely on predictive modeling to understand all the ways in which climate change could impact power grids in the future, rather than focusing on how weather has affected them in the past.
“The problem is we’re entering into a period in which that backwards looking data is increasingly less and less helpful for understanding what forward looking trajectories are going to look like,” Miller said. “We’re not doing a very good job of stress testing our infrastructures for future climate risks.”
In Texas, cities like Houston and Austin have spent years improving their grids. Known as “smart grids,” these modernizations to electrical meters and power lines allow utilities and customers to communicate and react more quickly to changes in demand.
Overbye is the director of Texas A&M University’s Smart Grid Center. He prefers the term “smarter grid,” saying the grid has been getting more intelligent over time since its creation more than a hundred years ago.
“Grids are getting better and better at being able to respond to extreme weather, but that doesn’t mean that extreme weather is not a challenge to the grid,” said Overbye.
Looking Forward
Updates to the nation’s aging power infrastructure is sorely needed to prepare for future weather-induced disasters. If the world continues to rely on fossil fuels and release large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, research suggests that the cost to operate the grid in parts of Arizona and Texas, for example, will get 20% more expensive by 2080-2099 compared to 2019.
“What you have to balance in your planning,” Overbye said, “is the likelihood of the event versus the expense it would take to mitigate it.”
When these weather disasters do happen, they’re expensive—to the tune of billions of dollars. And the frequency and cost of weather and climate disasters are on the rise.
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, which just passed the Senate and awaits a vote in the House, would aim $73 billion at updating the country’s electricity grid, with a focus on renewable energy.
But it will likely take more than money to prepare our power systems for the changing climate—it will also take reframing how we view the infrastructure itself, not just as monoliths that stand the test of time, but as systems that are agile and flexible enough for our changing environment.
Smart grids, for example, are better able to respond when extreme weather hits. Microgrids are also more flexible options. They are smaller electric grids that can power anything from a building to a college campus. Designed to work with or independently from the rest of the grid, microgrids can continue to run even when the rest of the system is knocked offline due to extreme weather.
“Infrastructure shouldn’t just be the systems that we put down and they control the environment for a long time,” Chester said. “Instead, they should be responsive to the environment. Now, that is an environment that we’ve created, for better or worse.”