Episode 34: Texas Power Outages: Climate Change

In this episode of the podcast, I have talked about “Texas Power Outage” which led millions of people without electricity.

Additional Info:
El Paso, Texas, which is on a different grid than the rest of the state, largely kept its power on despite seeing the same bone-chilling temperatures. About 3,000 electricity customers had an outage lasting less than five minutes, CBS affiliate KDBC-TV reported. And while the Great Plains and Midwest also saw rolling blackouts, they were far smaller than in Texas, in part because the grid in the Midwest was able to pull electricity from a grid in the East, according to the American Council on Renewable Energy.
"There have been arguments that fossil fuels are necessary for resilience. I think this shows that that's an argument that needs to be interrogated," said McNamara of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She is one of many energy experts who are advocating for more distributed power generation as a way to hedge against inevitable extreme weather events.
According to Rich Sorkin, founder and chief executive of Jupiter Intelligence, a company that helps governments and companies manage climate change risks, the power industry is not well-prepared for the extremes it faces and therefore has a lot of work to do to be more resilient to what climate change could bring. The power sector is better prepared for extreme events in parts of Europe, New York, Florida and Hawaii, Sorkin said, “and very, very far behind where it needs to be pretty much everywhere [else].” “It’s the same dynamic whether we’re talking about fire in California and Spain, heat in Dubai and Phoenix, flooding in Florida and Tokyo, cold, wind and flooding in Texas, etc., etc. The vast majority of these places are livable with sufficient planning and investment for quite some time,” Sorkin said via email.“Without that planning and investment, a hellscape will be upon us.”
In a future likely to feature more destructive storms potentially causing more damage to infrastructure, some power outages are inevitable, experts warn. Rather than relying on centralized large power plants, they advocate investing in backup power in the form of battery storage run by utilities and individual homes. In such a scenario, if a central power plant stops operating, each neighborhood or block could have a source of power and heat for emergencies.
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