Living with tech not built for climate of this century

It’s not the new technology of renewable power that’s destabilizing the electric grid. It’s the new weather. The U.S. electric industry plans for the weather of the past, building systems that can withstand the intensity of storms, heat waves and cold snaps long considered normal. But that normal has been made obsolete by climate change that’s has already pushed global average temperatures beyond previous bounds. Extreme weather events like last week’s Texas deep freeze that left millions of homes and business in the dark were once written off as “black swans,” so rare it didn’t pay for utility companies to prepare for them. Now they happen more often.

“Extreme heat events, extreme storm events have become more common, and the infrastructure we have right now, across the board, has been designed for the weather of the 20th century rather than the climate of the 21st,” said Constantine Samaras, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

What was until recently considered a storm of the century now lands every few years, and yet the way we build and run the power grid hasn’t adapted. What has changed most visibly on the grid is renewable energy. Critics rushed to blame snow-covered solar panels and frozen wind turbines for last week’s massive Texas blackouts. But while single-digit temperatures knocked out some renewable power, by far the bigger problem came from older technologies. Natural gas wellheads, pipelines and power plants that account for the majority of energy in Texas suffered widespread malfunctions in cold they weren’t designed to handle.

The Electric Power Research Institute, a think tank serving utilities, warned in a recent study that the industry “systematically understates” the likelihood and severity of extreme weather events striking multiple power plants at once. The study arrived two weeks before a cold snap hammered Texas, bringing about just such a scenario.

Most of the industry’s planners have long used an unofficial standard that hardens systems enough to ensure that they would only be forced online for one day out of ten years, according to Daniel Brooks, vice president of integrated grid and energy systems at EPRI. But those expectations of what passes for the worst weather in a 10-year span are based on past experiences accumulated over decades.

The need to change planning standards will only increase, Brooks said, if the fight against global warming leads society to electrify many things that now use fossil fuels, from cars to homes. That’s the linchpin of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, and it’s a trend already picking up momentum with local efforts in many U.S. cities to ban natural gas hookups for new buildings.

Emily Grubert, assistant professor of environmental engineering at Georgia Tech, worries that changing climate conditions will expose another lurking problem on the grid: deferred maintenance. Treating extreme heat waves or deep freezes as unpredictable black swans can be an excuse for underinvestment. “They’re rare,” she said, “so why spend money on something rare when you can say it’s completely unforeseeable?”

But hardening grids against any kind of wild weather costs money, said Tom Fanning, chief executive officer of utility giant Southern Company. And those costs eventually make their way into monthly utility bills, so he doesn’t undertake such measures without thinking about normal weather.

“It’s like buying a winter coat in Miami,” Fanning said. “How often do you pull that baby out?”