Changing the Game: Will Superstorms Change the Way We Build?
In the last month, two major hurricanes hit the United States causing unprecedented damage in Houston, Texas and forcing millions to evacuate Florida ahead of the most powerful storm ever recorded in the Atlantic. In the wake of these storms, many people are discussing the impacts that rising global temperatures and warming ocean waters have on the climate, contributing to unpredictable weather and powerful storms like Harvey and Irma.
These two storms alone have killed dozens of people, damaged homes and buildings, disrupted supply chains and economic activity, and are expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars to repair these damages. While the country is rightly focused on loss of life, personal property, and the massive effort that will be required to rebuild, the number of Americans that have lost power due to these storms brings to light a problem that continues to face the country: the electricity grid is outdated and unequipped to handle the potential impacts of future storms.
If you want to understand how the US gets its electricity you wouldn’t have to look any further than the Pearl Street Station designed by Thomas Edison in 1882. While the extent of the electricity grid has come a long way, the underlying principles of how electricity is distributed to customers around the country is essentially unchanged. The electric grid has three components:
Generation --> Transmission --> Distribution
While the electric grid is relatively stable and reliable, there are a number of reasons that the power can go out. Issues with the transmission grid (large power lines that bring electricity hundreds of miles from rural power plants to population centers) can cause widespread blackouts that are rather uncommon in the United States. An example of transmission outages is “rolling blackouts,” which occur when power companies or governments intentionally turn off transmission corridors when electricity demand is greater than generation capabilities. Some damage to transmission lines were reported from hurricane Harvey in Texas, leading to widespread power loss.
The more common reason for power outages are disruptions in the distribution lines that carry electricity from the transmission lines to homes and businesses. These outages occur when trees fall on power lines, extreme weather such as wind and ice damage the power lines, or any number of causes like a car hitting a utility pole or wildlife making contact with components of the electric grid.
Getting back to the current issues we face with the power grid – Hurricane Harvey caused more than 300,000 households to lose power in Texas, while Hurricane Irma cut off power to over 1.1 million customers in Florida. In total, more than 10 million people were without power due to these two storms.
In response, tens of thousands of utility workers from all over the US and Canada have been deployed to restore power to millions. Even with 60,000 workers in Florida alone, it may take days or even weeks to get the grid back online in all of the affected areas. In 2012, it took more than a month to get power back to the customers affected by Hurricane Sandy.
Upgrading the electric grid is no small task. Burying power lines underground might be one way to reduce the environmental risks to the power system, but the costs and infrastructural challenges for this process are prohibitive and unlikely to happen by the good will of profit-chasing utility companies.
Most of the major improvements made to the power grid in past decades have been technological rather than in the utility infrastructure. Electricity demand management and system monitoring can reduce demand challenges and alert utility companies of outages for rapid fixes, but technology alone cannot prevent widespread outages from weather events and other potential physical damage to the grid.
Distributed Energy Resources, such as small-scale renewable energy, batter storage, and microgrid applications have the most potential to disrupt the 150-year-old electricity industry and power grid. These systems give customers the option to generate their own power on site and store power they might need if and when the electric grid goes out temporarily. Microgrid technologies provide similar services and protection from major outages on a more commercial or community-wide scale.
There is no quick-fix for the electricity grid. However, the argument that upgrading the electric grid is too expensive is as outdated as the electric grid itself. The cost of repairing the electric grid after storms like Sandy, Harvey, and Irma is well into the billions. Economic loss from blackouts and power outages that happen regularly a few times a year cost the US economy between $104 billion and $164 billion. If anything, beginning to rebuild the power system could prevent billions of dollars in future economic losses, let alone provide infrastructure improvement and job security to many people for years to come.