In a summer of extremes we’ve seen a chain of infrastructure battering events, not just in the US, but around the planet. We are seeing 20th Century infrastructure run into a 21st century climate powered wood chipper.
One bright spot – California weathered a recent heat wave with increased build-out of renewables, primarily solar, and battery storage.
Millions of households in Houston suffered blackouts in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl last week, losing air conditioning as sweltering heat followed the storm. Hitting emerging and developed economies, outages from Ecuador to India in recent weeks offer a foretaste of coming disruption.
The climate crisis exposes electricity networks to flash floods ripping down transmission towers, droughts drying up hydro reservoirs and demand spikes from cooling during searing heat.
“The whole power system was built and designed in one climatic era and now is being asked to work in a different climatic era,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas at Austin. “It just means more things can go wrong.”
Unstable networks create instability for businesses, roil politics and threaten lives. Expanding the grid will cost about $24.1 trillion to meet net-zero goals by 2050, outpacing the investment needed in renewable-power capacity, according to BloombergNEF. Because of their vast areas and high energy use, the US and China face the biggest bills, but no country is spared.
“As temperatures and access to air conditioning increases, it will put the grid under more strain,” said Felicia Aminoff, an analyst at BNEF. “We have already seen an increase in summer peak demand in certain European countries, such as Greece, as well as in the Middle East.”
A common theme behind grid issues is poor planning. In Kuwait, residents of one of the world’s richest countries had to endure rolling outages in June. Grid operators deliberately shut down parts of the grid to prevent a total blackout as power plants struggled to meet a demand surge when temperatures exceeded 50 degrees Celsius (122F). The incident led to fire departments getting inundated with calls to rescue people stuck in elevators.
Sacramento Bee (registration required):
California’s power grid emerged from a nearly three weeklong record-setting heat wave relatively unscathed, and officials are crediting years of investment in renewable energy — particularly giant batteries that store solar power for use when the sun stops shining. “This was a good early test that we passed in very good shape,” said Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator (CAISO), on Monday. “Investments in new clean energy and in dispatchable battery storage played a major role.”
CAISO last issued calls for voluntary conservation two years ago, during a 2022 bout of extreme heat. Since then, roughly 11,600 megawatts of new renewable energy sources have come onto California’s electricity grid. That includes 10,000 megawatts of battery power, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours. California is now home to the most grid batteries in the world outside of China, Mainzer said. “Batteries performed very well in this event, they were charged and ready at the right times for optimization on the grid,” he added. “That made a big, big difference.”
Many Californians remember a suffocating heat wave in August 2020 that prompted rolling blackouts for several hundred thousand Californians, and some will remember another two years ago that prompted a series of voluntary Flex Alerts. Those periods were likely on their mind over the last few weeks, when sweltering heat enveloped California. This prolonged heat wave was the hottest 20-day period on record in Sacramento and set an all-time temperature record of 124 degrees in Palm Springs. But emergency alerts or calls for voluntary conservation were ultimately avoided this time around.