... dressing our infrastructure for both August and February
When a deep freeze knocked out power, heat and water to a huge swath of Texas, it brought attention to an issue energy analysts have warned about for years: Much of the country’s critical infrastructure is not prepared to handle weather extremes that will become more common with climate change.
Constantine Samaras, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, studies and teaches about ways to make infrastructure more resilient.
(This interview has been edited for space and clarity.)
In a nutshell, how would you describe what went wrong in Texas?
At the heart of it, this was a supply and demand problem. Lots of people needed energy, and there wasn’t enough supply. There wasn’t enough supply because both the power plants and the natural gas system were not ready for the cold.
You tweeted recently that our infrastructure has clothes for May when it needs to be dressed for both August and February.
I think it’s an appropriate analogy. The system in Texas has clothes for summer. And it’s good to have clothes for summer in Texas, because it’s hot. But it’s important to also have a winter coat laying around for those times when things get really cold.
It’s not like it didn’t happen before. In 2011, the southwest had another deep freeze, and the same types of things happened. Natural gas lines froze, the roads were too icy and there was snow, so they couldn’t get out to fix some of these equipment problems. A lot of people lost both electricity and heat. In Texas, they made a choice to save a little bit of money by not preparing for an extreme event that they thought was rare. But it happened in 2011. It happened in 1989.
One of the challenges of adapting to climate change is predicting what we haven’t experienced before. You’ve said that, at best, we have planned for the extremes of the last century, but not for this one.
Any time you’re building any infrastructure — whether it’s a power plant or a storm drain or a dam or an airport — the people who are designing it generally need some information about what the local climate is like. And in almost all cases, that information comes from looking backward rather than looking forward. It requires something extra — either a push from politicians or hopefully their own design shops — to say, “This is going to be around for a long time. We should design this for the future.”
Are Pennsylvania’s energy systems vulnerable to the same failures that we saw in Texas?
Unlike Texas, Pennsylvania’s electricity doesn’t stop at our state borders. If there’s a problem with power plants in Pennsylvania, we can import power from Ohio, West Virginia or New York. We also export a lot of power to all of the states around us. So the first difference between Pennsylvania and Texas is that we’re connected to the rest of the eastern part of the country. The second difference is that we typically have fairly cold weather here, and we have equipment that generally can handle the extreme cold. If you look at what has happened here in PJM, our regional grid, during similar cold-weather events, they did not trigger that same level of disaster.
Is Pennsylvania vulnerable to different kinds of weather events?
Pennsylvania could see much hotter summer temperatures under climate change than we have experienced before. Are we built for extreme summer, with 90-plus degrees for many days? That’s an important thing that I would be asking the northern grids. We get a lot of thunderstorms in this area that drop a lot of rain really fast. We have to be able to make sure that people are safe: safe from flooding, safe from landslides, safe from sewage overflows. So we have a different set of challenges here.
You created a course called “Climate Change Adaptation for Infrastructure,”
which you note on your website was one of the first in the world to teach climate change adaptation to civil and environmental engineers. When you walk into that class on the first day of the semester, what do you tell your students to try to set the stage for why this is critical?
One of the things that I want our students to know, and they immediately understand, is that climate resilience and climate mitigation are not something extra that engineers need to add on to the end of a project: “All right, we did this project. Now let’s put a tree on it.” That’s not how it works. To be a good engineer, you need to be able to reduce carbon emissions, and you have to design for climate impacts. It’s not only within your ethical responsibilities; it’s the minimum requirement to be a good engineer now.
What’s the best climate change novel or film?
“Mad Max: Fury Road.” Great movie, and it also teaches one about the importance of water conservation.
This past year, I was very grateful for my stockpile of dried beans. I’m wondering if you have a favorite personal resilience tool that you keep on hand in case of emergencies.
We also have a stockpile of dried beans. Actually, I was thinking about this, and those don’t help our resilience plan if there’s no electricity. We should probably mix it up between canned and dried.