Millions of Texans woke up in the dark on Tuesday after a severe winter storm hit the state, limiting access to natural gas and freezing wind turbines. But the vulnerabilities of the state’s electricity grid are not just a matter of infrastructure, notes the The New York Times.
The times writes that the current scenario is what awaits people everywhere, unless climate change is not just adopted and addressed:
The crisis highlighted a deeper alert for energy systems across the country. Electrical networks can be designed to handle a wide range of harsh conditions – as long as network operators can safely predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electrical networks will face new and extreme weather events that go beyond the historical conditions for which these networks were designed, putting systems at risk of catastrophic failure.
Building electrical networks that are resilient in the face of an increasingly wild and unpredictable climate will be a huge challenge, experts say. In many cases, it can be expensive, although, as Texas shows, network failure costs can also be extremely expensive.
“It’s essentially a question of how much insurance you want to buy,” said Jesse Jenkins, a power systems engineer at Princeton University, in Times report. “What makes this problem even more difficult is that we are now in a world where, especially with climate change, the past is no longer a good guide to the future. We need to prepare ourselves much better for the unexpected. “
Experts say the Texas power grid, which is independent, aims to cope with high summer temperatures, but not winter storms.
“No model of power system imagined that all 254 counties in Texas would be under a winter storm alert at the same time,” said Joshua Rhodes, a power grid expert at the University of Texas at Austin, Times report. “It is putting a lot of pressure on the electricity network and the gas network that feeds electricity and heat.”
The times The article argues that as the planet is warming up, extreme cold can decrease over time.
“But some climate scientists have also suggested that global warming could, paradoxically, bring on more winter storms as seen this week,” Times reported. “There is some research suggesting that warming in the Arctic is weakening the jet stream, the high-level airflow that surrounds the northern latitudes and generally retains the icy polar vortex. This allows cold air to escape south, especially when an additional heating explosion hits the stratosphere and deforms the vortex. The result can be episodes of temperature drop, even in places that are rarely cut by frost. “
But while the debate on climate change continues, The times claims, if left unchecked, will cause heat waves, droughts, floods, water scarcity and “other calamities” – all at the expense of production and access to electricity.
Making energy networks resilient is difficult and expensive.
“This is going to be a significant challenge,” said Emily Grubert, an expert in electrical systems at Georgia Tech. “We need to decarbonize our energy systems so that climate change does not continue to get worse, but we also need to adapt to changing conditions at the same time. And only the last one will be very expensive. We can already see that the systems we have today are not handling it very well. “
Follow Penny Starr at Twitter or send news tips to [email protected]