The summer of 2022 is proving to be a summer of
blackouts.
Heat waves scorching much of the country and now t
housands are in the dark.
There is a high risk of e nergy emergencies this
summer.
Ohio suffered rolling brownouts a few weeks ago,
and now it is getting very dicey once again in Texas.
The average American experienced just over 8
hours of power outages in 2020.
The overall duration of power interruptions in the
U.S. more than doubled over the past five years.
Most people don't think about electricity at all
because it's such an incredibly reliable machine
that runs our homes and our businesses and our lives.
But the day you get up and flip the switch and the
powered lights don't come on, that's a really bad day,
and it's much worse today than it was before.
Beyond just inconvenience, blackouts cost the U.S.
an estimated $150 billion every year.
They can also be fatal as most recently seen during
the 2021 outage in Texas.
Power outages in the U.S.
are getting worse.
This is because, not that the grid has changed, but
because there is so much greater threat from extreme
weather and the number of extreme weather events of
every kind have increased significantly over the last
decade in particular.
As climate change intensifies and we see even
more of these extreme events which really stress
the system, we're going to see more of these outages
unless we take action to prevent them.
So why is the U.S.
power grid so unreliable and can it be fixed?
The U.S. power grid is a rapidly aging system with
some components that are over a century old.
70% of the nation's transmission lines and power
transformers are estimated to be over 25 years old.
Transmission lines have an average lifespan of 50
years, while transformers last between 25 and 40
years.
Many of these power plants that we rely on were built
in the seventies and are now the moral equivalent of
the 1971 Chrysler Newport that I learned to drive on.
But we're now in a world of Teslas, right?
We built this grid for a different set of conditions.
We built it for more tame weather conditions.
We built it for more boring customer loads.
We built it for a specific kind of power plants: large
nuclear, coal, gas plants.
We have not been able to think about how do we change
the grid effectively to deal with all of these
changes because the changes are happening faster than
our ability to change the grid.
Major power outages caused by weather-related events
rose by 67% between 2000 and 2019.
Natural disasters and severe weather directly
caused 96% of the power outages in 2020.
When outages occur, it's increasingly because of
extreme weather conditions: either really, really hot
weather, really, really cold weather like we had in
Texas in 2021, or during hurricanes, derechos, any of
these kind of extreme weather events which are
becoming more common.
The amount of humans and the grid that it can hurt is an
increasingly large target area for extreme weather to
hit. We have more transmission lines, more
people living in broader geographic spaces, and more
distribution system that could be taken out by
wildfires or hurricanes or tornadoes.
Electric grids are often ill-prepared against severe
weather because it relies on old historical data to
plan for the future.
They look at historic weather patterns and what
that meant for electricity demand.
But as climate change drives temperatures higher
and leading to things like droughts and floods, all of
which affect both electricity supply and
demand, that approach is really inadequate, and we
can't design a reliable system based on the
conditions of the past because those conditions
won't exist in the future.
The utilities know how to work in the existing system,
and there are a lot of risks and financial dangers
and shareholder issues and financial analysts with
short term incentives to just keep doing what you're
doing and we'll worry about next decade next decade.
Despite the Biden administration's effort to
improve the electric grid, the federal government seems
to lack the power to modernize the national grid.
Electricity systems are an area of shared federal and
state jurisdictions and it is one of the factors that
contributes to the complexity of modernizing
the grid and building out additional infrastructure.
I think there is a lot Congress could do here to
help modernize our power systems.
We're in a place right now in the U.S.
Congress where Congress just doesn't seem to do big
things, particularly in terms of regulation.
Congress does like to dole out money for certain
projects, but they don't really like to regulate
industries the way they once did.
Certain state and regional regulators often have
political incentives to fight against changes to the
power grid.
The state entities that regulate electric utilities
are called state public utility commissions and in
some states, those commissioners are elected.
So if we're talking about making investments that are
going to be really expensive and are going to
be increasing electricity bills, they might see a lot
of pushback from customers about that and that might
affect their chances of reelection.
There were a total of 549 policy and deployment
actions on grid modernization during the
second quarter of 2022.
Of the $12.86 billion in grid modernization
investment under consideration, regulators
only approved $478.7 million during the quarter.
People don't want this kind of infrastructure, quote
unquote, in their backyard.
So while everybody agrees that the infrastructure is
needed and that the projects are valuable, they
tend to be very, very hard to cite.
However, those who are directly affected say there
are valid reasons to fight against such disruptive
projects.
Not-in-my-backyard, "NIMBY", is insular because of course
people are going to care about what's in their
backyard. I use solar on my farm.
I use solar for fencing.
I have solar on my rooftop in my barn.
So we're not opposed to solar.
But it doesn't belong on farmland.
It doesn't belong on agricultural zoned area.
It certainly doesn't belong on timberland.
These projects are very destructive to the land
because you have to come in, mass grade a lot of
projects, it means you're clear cutting trees, you're
clear cutting farmland, you're putting gravel roads,
perimeter fence, hundreds of thousands of acres of
glass panels.
Efforts to modernize the grid often target rural
communities as the site for massive projects.
We're trying to do what's right by our county.
We're trying to preserve the rural nature of our
county and really convince our elected officials that
the rural character is more important than caving in to
developers who are sending a lot of money or promising
a lot of money when we see other counties really
struggling with this issue and suffering from the
consequences.
In many cases, utility companies themselves are
also at odds with grid modernization, which could
hurt their profit.
Utilities are century-old companies that have local
monopoly privileges and they are focused on those
local service territories, that is the consumers that
they have the exclusive right to deliver power to.
And they often are not incentivized to build the
sort of big power lines we really need stretching
across large parts of the country because they're so
locally focused and in fact bringing power in from other
places can actually harm the power plants that they
own.
Even if the updates were to be carried out, the $2.5
billion approved by Congress to modernize and
expand America's power grid is far from enough.
The consultancy firm Marsh McLennan estimates that
140,000 miles of transmission lines will have
to be replaced before 2050, which will cost the U.S.
more than $700 billion alone.
But what's more important is ensuring that the
investments are spent where they're truly needed.
You know, we should be doing that in a considered and
careful way so that we're not just sort of throwing
money at the problem.
The industry has not been investing in sort of the
right types of lines.
Often they've been just rebuilding last century's
grid because that's the easier thing to do rather
than thinking about creating a larger network
that we need to really meet this century's challenges.
Improving America's power grid is still achievable
with the right focus.
This problem is absolutely solvable.
It is going to be costly, but the benefits will really
be significant in terms of reliability.
The more we expand the transmission grid, the more
we have regions that are able to depend on each other
and the better we are able to interconnect and add new
generation onto the grid as well.
Investing in energy efficiency could also be a
step in the right direction.
Energy efficiency is things like improving building
envelopes to keep more cold air in in the summer and
hot air inside in the winter.
The high heat conditions drive up demand for
electricity because everyone's operating their
fans and operating their air conditioners.
If we invest in more efficient appliances, that
brings demand down.
It reduces the stress on the system, enhances the
resilience and reliability of the system, and it saves
all of us money because we're using and paying for
less electricity.
Renewable energy in the form of solar and wind can not
only slow down climate change, but provide a
reliable and domestic source of energy for
American consumers.
The U.S. has been making swift changes in response.
The share of renewable energy and electricity
generated in America almost doubled from 427 billion
kilowatt hours in 2010 to 826 billion kilowatt hours
in 2021.
The Biden administration has also made promises to
reach 100% clean electricity by the year
2035. But more investments are needed to meet the
ambitious goals of clean energy.
The transition to renewables is hugely important to avoid
making the climate impacts that are already stressing
the electricity system any worse.
The issue with adding more and more wind and solar
power onto the grid: we need something to integrate
it because the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't
always shine. Now eventually, we will have
large scale, long duration batteries that will be that
integrating technology, or we may use hydrogen.
There's a lot of interest in making hydrogen systems
as an alternative to natural gas.
There's a new nuclear technology that's being
developed called a small modular reactor, and they
could be flexible enough to be able to provide that
integrated resource for wind and solar.
Continuing to encourage the innovation of new
technologies will prove vital in preparing for the
future.
This is a sector that has tremendous innovative
potential. There's a lot of new companies that are
interested in participating in the development of
infrastructure. There are all sorts of new
technologies that can help improve the resilience of
the electricity system. And one of the challenges for
policymakers is figuring out how to enable the
innovation that's possible in this space.
How do we bring in new players, new thinking, new
technologies to make sure that we're building a system
and we're operating a system that's designed for
the 21st century, not for the last century.