Bomb cyclones, blackouts and climate resilience

Climate change has a clear action plan: “electrify everything.” This means replacing natural gas for home heating and cooking with electricity and switching from internal combustion engines (ICEs) to electric vehicles (EVs).

Despite a clear strategy, there is a problem. With total dependence on electricity, how would households deal with power outages due to snow and wind storms, hurricanes and wildfires? Are they now expected to install generators and battery backups? Given the relatively high cost of backups, low-income households probably won’t be able to afford them. For these households, power outages can mean living in darkness and without heat.

Could households and communities think of a collective response to reduce the risk of outages? If outages are due to downed lines, the network may be “hardened” (for underground lines, structural upgrading, flood or fire protection) so it normally functions in extreme weather events. It is true that this will cost money, but households may be able to support a monthly levy on electricity bills (or new bond levies) so that utilities (cities) can invest in lattice hardening?

Washington state residents are likely asking this question as they deal with the bomb cyclone that has caused power outages in over half a million homes. Grid hardening is also being discussed in other states in response to hurricanes, tropical cyclones, snow stormsand forest fires.

Grid is the weak link in the climate transition

Climate change faces three challenges: (1) generating clean (zero emission) electricity, (2) moving electricity from production sites to consumption centers, and (3) switching from fossil fuels to electricity in transport and buildings.

Most policy efforts tend to be aimed at generating clean electricity. This is the reason why renewable energy is the banner in the climate discussions. There is also a significant push to replace gas with electricity at the consumption level via EV policies and discourage/ban gas use in buildings.

Transmission/distribution issues are neglected in climate discussions, which is unfortunate because without a reliable way to move electricity, energy decarbonisation will be in trouble. Climate change thus requires massive investments in new high-voltage lines (where there is one significant shortage at national level), intra-regional and local distribution grids, as well as hardening the grid so that it can withstand punishment from extreme weather events, which are expected to become more severe and frequentt.

Without a resilient grid, power outages can reduce public support for decarbonisation. Citizens may wonder about the wisdom of moving away from natural gas in buildings whose pipelines tend to be less vulnerable to extreme events (cold spells seem to be an exception). The same logic may apply to the transport sector, as electric cars are beginning to account for a large part of the fleet.

Improving grid resilience

Climate policy should not be associated with stopped mobility, dark and cold buildings and spoiled food in refrigerators. An important collective (as opposed to household) level response to outages is to strengthen grid resilience via underground power lines.

Politicians recognize this challenge. USA Ministry of Energy’s (DOE) website notes, “The electric power distribution system in the United States has over 5.5 million line-miles with over 180 million power poles, all of which are susceptible to damage from weather and its effects, and accounts for a majority of power outages in the country each year.Climate change-driven extreme weather events are increasing the frequency and intensity of power outages across the U.S., harming communities and disrupting livelihoods. Underground power lines are a proven way to improve system reliability for both transmission and distribution grids, as weather events are less likely to disrupt systems protected underground.”

Undergrounding has its downside too. Buried lines are difficult to access and repair. There are more of them animal to install in relation to overhead lines. This is why some suggest that undergrounding could probably be limited to areas where the terrain is more favorable and outages are frequent and long. The US Energy Information Agency provides state-level data on average annual power outages experienced by electric customers and the frequency of those outages. This can allow for careful targeting of expensive underground efforts.

How do you finance the underground? The federal government has earmarked $10.5 billion under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for Network resilience and innovation partnerships. Grid resilience is an important issue in some states such as California and Florida. But hardening the grid does not appear to be a high priority in Washington state, a climate leader. In his 2022 report to the governor Working Group on Transmission Corridors from the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council highlights the need to upgrade the existing transmission infrastructure. Although it mentions reliability standards, the report does not identify the need for grid hardening. Furthermore, we do not find significant allocations in other climate initiatives (independent of federal funding) for underground power lines, including the cap-and-invest system, which brings in annual revenues of more than 1 billion dollars.

So is grid resilience a local problem?

Grid resilience has an important local component involving cities and local utilities. Really, Puget Sound EnergyWashington state’s largest utility, notes: “PSE can build transmission lines underground. But doing so requires cost-sharing between PSE and the community requesting it. This is because underground is typically considered a local benefit, and it costs significantly more to build a power line underground. As a result, it is up to the local community to decide whether to invest in an underground line.”

In some states, therefore, the majority of the costs of the underground must either be borne by cities (which will presumably fund it via bond levies) or by consumers as the utilities pass the cost on to them via interest rate hikes. Initial evidence suggests that consumers are ready to support these efforts. In one newer paperwe asked California residents their willingness to pay $30 a month to bury power lines. We found a relatively high level of willingness (5.2 on a 1-7 scale). This gives utilities some confidence to outline their underground plans and rate hike proposals to invite feedback from customers and stakeholders. Since rate hikes are regulated by government agencies and regulatory approvals take time, utilities should not delay submitting rate hike proposals. The increased frequency of hurricanes, storms, wildfires and now cyclone bombs should hopefully accelerate policy discussions about grid resilience.