When Grids Fail

 

Climate change is the mortal enemy of public infrastructure - the highways, railways, ports and electrical grids we (i.e. our parents and grandparents) built to facilitate our modern economies. The engineers of the day stayed busy with their slide rules as they looked for that sweet spot where affordability met dependability. Among other things they had to factor in existing and future demand, leaving plenty of room for growth, and the conditions that the infrastructure would have to withstand over the coming decades.

One thing those engineers rarely took into account was climate change. They designed to meet the relatively gentle climate of the Holocene. They did not, nor could they, anticipate the more destructive, more challenging demands of the energized climate of the Anthropocene.

When it comes to failing infrastructure the electrical grid is the miners' canary. Around the world, the local grid must meet increasing demands for cooling in the heatwaves of summer and for heating in the freezing blasts of winter.

Today, Texas is in a rare and unexpected deep freeze. Cold Arctic air has the Lone Star state in its grip and the grid can't meet the demand for ever more electricity. It's a hard lesson in what the future has in store.

Huge winter storms have plunged large parts of the central and southern United States into an energy crisis this week as frigid blasts of Arctic weather crippled electric grids and left millions of Americans without power amid dangerously cold temperatures.

Analysts have begun to identify a few key factors behind the grid failures in Texas. Record-breaking cold weather spurred residents to crank up their electric heaters and pushed demand for electricity beyond the worst-case scenarios that grid operators had planned for. At the same time, many of the state’s gas-fired power plants were knocked offline amid icy conditions, and some plants appeared to suffer fuel shortages as natural gas demand spiked nationwide. Many of Texas’ wind turbines also froze and stopped working, although this was a smaller part of the problem.

...Building electric grids that are resilient in the face of increasingly wild and unpredictable weather will be an enormous challenge, experts said. In many cases, it may prove expensive, although, as Texas shows, the costs of grid failure can be extremely costly, too.

“It’s essentially a question of how much insurance you want to buy,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University. “What makes this problem even harder is that we’re now in a world where, especially with climate change, the past is no longer a good guide to the future. We have to get much better at preparing for the unexpected.”

It's a bit complex to explain but Arctic air that plunges into subtropical regions such as Texas and just parks itself there is the product of a rapidly warming polar region. Last year a small town in Siberia recorded 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as other regions. That creates a more energized atmosphere that is able to overpower the temperate, Ferrel cell that once kept that cold air largely confined to the Arctic.

Rossby waves that plunge deep into southern regions and high into Arctic areas develop and they have a nasty habit of parking themselves over their destination.  In February a few years ago, Atlanta, Georgia, was plunged into a deep freeze while Barrow, Alaska basked in temperatures in the mid-60s. The graphic below illustrates how the jet stream is altered from the gently undulating snake of the past into a pattern of peaks and troughs.

What's underway in Texas illustrates a common failure. We don't want to pay to fix these vulnerabilities. Restoring resilience costs money. This is the era of "Everyday Low Taxes." We don't want to pay them and those who levy taxes don't want to raise them lest they open a Pandora's Box of really awkward questions about why the rich really aren't paying their share, tax dodging and such.

What our leaders don't want to discuss is that, costly as it is, it's cheaper to rebuild our infrastructure now than what it will cost the economy and all of us when it fails. What was designed and built for the past cannot be relied upon to serve our vital needs in the future. The engine warning light is on. We can ignore it and just keep driving this beater, taking our chances, but we know how that ends even if we don't know precisely when.