A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids
Huge winter storms plunged large parts of the central and southern United States into an energy crisis this week, with frigid blasts of Arctic weather crippling and amid dangerously cold temperatures. The grid failures were most severe in , where more than four million people woke up Tuesday morning to . Separate regional grids in the Southwest and Midwest also faced serious strain. As of Tuesday afternoon, in the storm or its aftermath. Analysts have begun to identify key factors behind the . Record-breaking cold weather spurred residents to crank up their electric heaters and pushed power demand beyond the worst-case scenarios that grid operators had planned for. At the same time, a large fraction of the states gas-fired power plants were knocked offline amid icy conditions, with some plants suffering fuel shortages as natural gas demand spiked. Many of Texas also froze and stopped working. The crisis sounded an alarm for power systems throughout the country. Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure. While scientists in this weeks winter storms, it is clear that global warming poses a barrage of additional threats to power systems nationwide, including fiercer heat waves and water shortages. Measures that could help make electric grids more robust such as fortifying power plants against extreme weather, or installing more backup power sources could prove expensive. But as Texas shows, blackouts can be extremely costly, too. And, experts said, unless grid planners start planning for increasingly wild and unpredictable climate conditions, grid failures will happen again and again. Its essentially a question of how much insurance you want to buy, said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University. What makes this problem even harder is that were now in a world where, especially with climate change, the past is no longer a good guide to the future. We have to get much better at preparing for the unexpected. Texas , which largely operates independently from the rest of the country, has been built with the states most common weather extremes in mind: soaring summer temperatures that cause millions of Texans to turn up their air-conditioners all at once. While freezing weather is rarer, grid operators in Texas have also long known that electricity demand can spike in the winter, particularly after damaging cold snaps in 2011 and 2018. But this weeks winter storms, which buried the state in and ice, and led to record-cold temperatures, surpassed all expectations and pushed the grid to its breaking point. Texas grid operators that, in the worst case, the state would use 67 gigawatts of electricity during the winter peak. But by Sunday evening, power demand . As temperatures dropped, many homes were relying on older, inefficient electric heaters that consume more power. The problems compounded from there, with frigid weather on Monday disabling power plants with capacity totaling more than 30 gigawatts. The vast majority of those failures occurred at thermal power plants, like natural gas generators, as plummeting temperatures paralyzed plant equipment and soaring demand for natural gas left some plants struggling to obtain sufficient fuel. A number of the states power plants were also offline for scheduled maintenance in preparation for the summer peak. The states fleet of wind farms also lost up to 4.5 gigawatts of capacity at times, as many turbines stopped working in cold and icy conditions, though . In essence, experts said, an electric grid optimized to deliver huge quantities of power on the hottest days of the year was caught unprepared when temperatures plummeted. While analysts are still working to untangle all of the reasons behind Texas grid failures, some have also wondered whether the unique way the state manages its largely deregulated electricity system may have played a role. In the mid-1990s, for instance, Texas decided against paying energy producers to hold a fixed number of backup power plants in reserve, instead letting market forces dictate what happens on the grid. On Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott called for an emergency reform of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit corporation that oversees the flow of power in the state, saying its performance had been anything but reliable over the previous 48 hours. In theory, experts said, there are technical solutions that can avert such problems. Wind turbines can be equipped with heaters and other devices so that they can operate in icy conditions as is often done in the upper Midwest, where cold weather is more common. Gas plants can be built to store oil on-site and switch over to burning the fuel if needed, as is often done in the Northeast, where natural gas shortages are common. Grid regulators can design markets that pay extra to keep a larger fleet of backup power plants in reserve in case of emergencies, as is done in the Mid-Atlantic. But these solutions all cost money, and grid operators are often wary of forcing consumers to pay extra for safeguards. Building in resilience often comes at a cost, and theres a risk of both underpaying but also of overpaying, said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. Its a difficult balancing act. In the months ahead, as Texas grid operators and policymakers investigate this weeks blackouts, they will likely explore how the grid might be bolstered to handle extremely cold weather. Some possible ideas include: Building more connections between Texas and other states to balance electricity supplies, a move the state has long resisted; encouraging homeowners to install battery backup systems; or keeping additional power plants in reserve. The search for answers will be complicated by climate change. Over all, the state is getting warmer as global temperatures rise, and cold-weather extremes are, on average, becoming less common over time. But some climate scientists have also suggested that global warming could, paradoxically, bring more unusually fierce winter storms. Some research indicates that Arctic warming is , the high-level air current that circles the northern latitudes and usually holds back the frigid polar vortex. This can allow cold air to periodically escape to the South, resulting in episodes of bitter cold in places that rarely get nipped by frost. But this remains an active area of debate among climate scientists, with that polar vortex disruptions are becoming more frequent, making it even trickier for electricity planners to anticipate the dangers ahead. All over the country, utilities and grid operators are confronting similar questions, as climate change threatens to intensify heat waves, floods, water shortages and other calamities, all of which could create novel risks for the nations electricity systems. Adapting to those risks could carry a hefty price tag: One found that the Southeast alone may need 35 percent more electric capacity by 2050 simply to deal with the known hazards of climate change. And the task of building resilience is becoming increasingly urgent. Many policymakers are and electric heating as a way of curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But as more of the nations economy depends on reliable flows of electricity, the cost of blackouts will become ever more dire. This is going to be a significant challenge, said Emily Grubert, an infrastructure expert at Georgia Tech. We need to decarbonize our power systems so that climate change doesnt keep getting worse, but we also need to adapt to changing conditions at the same time. And the latter alone is going to be very costly. We can already see that the systems we have today arent handling this very well. John Schwartz , Dave Montgomery and Ivan Penn contributed reporting. is a climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. At The Times, he has also covered international climate talks and the changing energy landscape in the United States.