Already grappling with wildfires in the West, the unceasing threat of hurricanes along the eastern seaboard and ravaging drought in between, U.S. electric utilities seeing climate change test their grids can’t escape the drumbeat of news warning that the headwinds may only worsen.
That latest harbinger came in August, when the nonprofit First Street Foundation research group unveiled a peer-reviewed report suggesting an “extreme heat belt” is forming, stretching from Texas, Louisiana and the Southeast north to Wisconsin. The corridor covering one-quarter of the country’s land mass reportedly would affect 107 million people over the next three decades, bringing upticks in the number of days with the heat index — the combination of air temperature and humidity — above 100 degrees, challenging the electric infrastructure’s ability to keep air conditioners running, much less withstand the heat itself on an aging grid.
On the heels of a July that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration said was the country’s third-hottest since record-keeping began nearly 130 years ago, the foundation’s report adds grist to the call for the U.S. power sector to ramp up their resiliency against escalating effects of a warming climate.
None of that appears lost on the U.S. electric industry, Black & Veatch’s 2022-2023 Electric Report finds.
Among roughly 250 power sector stakeholders surveyed, roughly three in 10 respondents —28 percent — point to heat as the climatological event posing the biggest risk for delivering reliable system operations in the next three to five years. Cold and ice drew 19 percent of the responses, followed by wildfires (14 percent) and hurricanes (11 percent).
But what are utilities doing long-term to harden their systems against climate change? The findings may be surprising, given the warnings.
‘No Silver Bullet’
Noting that U.S. power outages from extreme weather have doubled over the past two decades, the U.S. Department of Energy warned in July that “as much of the U.S. now braces for hurricane season, soaring temperatures and wildfires, climate change is threatening the reliability of our current power system. Business-as-usual planning and operations are insufficient to produce resiliency against these threats.”
“There is no silver bullet technology to guarantee a reliable system, and every resource and system is at risk for failure: coal or natural gas fuel supplies can freeze, extended periods of low wind resource can occur, and transmission lines can fail,” the DOE added. “Reliability and resilience of the system stems from a portfolio of technologies and strategies that limits exposure to common risks and includes forward planning that considers the evolving threats from climate change, extreme weather and other unknown sources.”
Such look-ahead approaches could and should start with infusing extreme climatological event mitigation into long-term system strategies; however, just one-third of survey respondents confirm they’re doing this. Twenty-eight percent say they’re not including it, while four in 10 say they simply don’t know. Parsing those results shows that those who either are or are not using climatological event mitigation as part of their planning are close to parity — perhaps reflecting a lack of regulatory certainty about how such plans might be received.
U.S. power utilities are keenly aware of the impact that weather and the environment can have on their system operations, with many even having onsite meteorologists who prove crucial in helping stage crews at infrastructure vulnerabilities in advance of the storm, hastening response time when disruptions happen.
Climate Mitigation: An Abundance of Options
Yet not planning appropriately — even aggressively — for weather scenarios can exact a steep price. Case in point: The powerful, deadly winter storm in February 2021 that blanketed much of Texas with snow, ice and record low temperatures, disrupting power to 5 million people while wreaking havoc on water service.
Such disasters prove to be eye-openers for utilities, awakening them to extreme weather’s consequences, the prudency of hardening their systems against it and the need to commit to the sizable investment to make it happen.
While the possible scenarios are numbingly countless, half of the survey’s respondents say their utility does climate-related disaster scenario planning to prepare for potential disruptive events. An additional 23 percent acknowledge they don’t — perhaps given that storms seldom are the same, and it’s impossible to account for anything and everything that might transpire when it comes to climate, which itself can be acutely abstract.
Strategies or risk-mitigating techniques being used to address climate change run the gamut, according to the survey. More than half of respondents (53 percent) report adding system redundancy and alternate sources, followed by those who are adopting demand response and energy-efficient programs (35 percent), those doing more aggressive vegetative management (32 percent), and utilities winterizing their assets against freezing (27 percent) (Figure 14).
Making the Case for Funding, Investment
While many electric utilities see merit in bolstering their infrastructures’ climate resilience, getting regulatory signoff for the often-steep price tag — and recovering that cost from ratepayers likely to object — keeps such projects from being viable, no matter the utility’s commitment to it.
More than four in 10 — 44 percent — of respondents cited regulatory scrutiny or rate case approval as the biggest hurdle to obtaining investment in climate-related mitigation measures, with priorities and internal buy-ins, the difficulty in modeling future weather events, and technology advancements tightly grouped around 31 percent (Figure 15).
When it comes to best justifying the expense of climate change and resilience projects, it appears to be all about data. Roughly one-third of respondents cited modeling and risk analysis — or cost tracking to show cost recovery or system operational improvements — as the top two effective ways to make a case for such undertakings (Figure 16). One in five pointed to case studies and the precedence of peer utilities, though citing what others have done may hold less sway with regulators or other stakeholders in light of each utility’s varying and sometimes unique local and regional operational nuances.
Uncle Sam Steps In: A Time for Optimism, Action
The U.S. electric sector, long having wrestled with ever-aging infrastructure without adequate funding to modernize it, is getting some help from federal taxpayers.
Signed into law by President Joe Biden in November 2021, the $1.2-billion, bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) earmarks $73 billion for grid upgrades, including the buildout of thousands of miles of new, resilient transmission lines to help expand renewable energy ostensibly meant to mitigate climate change. That single biggest federal investment in power transmission in U.S. history comes at a time of runaway expansion of renewables.
Then in August, the “Inflation Reduction Act” became the single biggest climate investment commitment in U.S. history, with $369 billion over 10 years devoted to climate and clean energy provisions. That includes some $30 billion in grant and loan programs for electric utilities and states to advance the transition to cleaner, greener energy.
All of it is rooted in the premise that climate change is real, and the time to act is now. Forward-thinking utilities can and should embed climatic modeling into their road-mapping now, appreciating the mantra that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
With a myriad of climate-mitigation approaches at their disposal, utilities also would be wise to rethink their old planning approaches to avoid risk, ensure greater resilience and prioritize such projects.
Granted, climate models still hold uncertainties. The only thing that is clear is that weather stops for nothing and no one.
