Millions of Texans woke up in the dark on Tuesday after a severe winter storm exploded the state, restricting access to natural gas and freezing wind turbines. But the vulnerabilities of the state’s power grid are not just an issue of infrastructure 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 has highlighted a deeper warning for power systems across the country. Electrical grids can be designed to handle a wide range of serious conditions, as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will experience new and extreme weather conditions that go beyond the historical conditions for which the grids were designed, putting the systems at risk of catastrophic failure.
The experts said it would be a huge challenge to build electric grids that are resilient in light of increasingly wild and unpredictable weather. In many cases, it can be expensive, although the cost of network outages, as Texas points out, can also be very expensive.
“It’s essentially about how much insurance you want to buy,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University. Times report. ‘What makes this problem even more difficult is that we are now in a world where the past, especially with climate change, is no longer a good guide for the future. We need to get much better at preparing for the unexpected. ”
Experts say the power network in Texas, which is independent, is meant to handle the rising summer temperatures, but not winter storms.
“Nobody’s model of the power system predicted that all 254 Texas counties would come under a winter storm warning at the same time,” said Joshua Rhodes, an expert on the state’s electrical network at the University of Texas at Austin. Times report. “It puts a lot of strain on both the electricity network and the gas network that supplies both electricity and heat.”
The times According to the article, extreme cold weather can decrease over time as the planet warms up.
“But some climate scientists have also suggested that global warming could paradoxically lead to more winter storms than those seen this week,” the Times report. ‘There is research that indicates that the heating of the North Pole weakens the jet stream, the high-level current that surrounds the northern latitude and prevents the icy polar vortex. This allows the cold air to escape to the South, especially when an explosion of extra heat hits the stratosphere and deforms the vortex. The result can be episodes of submerged temperatures, even in places that are rarely cut by frost. ”
But as the debate on climate change continues, The times demands if not addressed, it will cause heat waves, droughts, floods, water shortages and “other disasters” – all at the expense of production and access to electricity.
It is difficult and expensive to make power grids resilient.
“It’s going to be a big challenge,” said Emily Grubert, an expert in electricity systems at Georgia Tech. ‘We need to make our power systems carbon-free so that climate change does not get worse, but at the same time we also need to adapt to changing conditions. And the latter alone is going to be very expensive. We can already see that the systems we have today do not handle this very well. ”
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