How future hurricanes could strain US cities’ power grids

The risk of power outages caused by hurricanes could increase by 50 percent in some parts of the United States, including Puerto Rico, in the coming decades due to climate change, according to a US government report. new analysis.

Researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute mapped out how future hurricanes could impact electricity supplies, showing residents how vulnerable their electricity supply is.

The research comes just after Hurricane Beryl broke records as the first Category 4 and 5 storm to form in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm flattened islands in the Caribbean, killing at least eight people and leaving vulnerable island communities in ruins. The storm made landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula on Friday, and its forecast path suggests it could hit northern Mexico and the Texas Gulf Coast this weekend.

“These hurricanes can cause really devastating power outages,” said Julian Rice, a data scientist at the national lab who helped develop the map. Those outages can have wider consequences, he said, such as reduced access to health care and shutting off the power used to heat and cool homes.

The researchers used computers for modeling nearly a million hurricanes under simulated climate scenarios. The models projected factors such as humidity, wind and sea surface temperatures under different potential warming situations between 2066 and 2100.

The Pacific Northwest team then worked with the Power Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on electricity research, to pair these simulated hurricanes with a power outage model trained on failure data of the 23 hurricanes that have hit the United States in the past decade.

The predictions suggest that increasingly powerful and wetter storms, fueled by the burning of fossil fuels, will make landfall more often and move further inland, with tangible effects on the grid. In these scenarios, increased rainfall will clog the ground and weigh down tree crowns. Trees could easily be uprooted or become unstable, fall onto power lines or trigger landslides that knock out electrical infrastructure.

The Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coastal regions are expected to see the zone of potential climate-driven storms and hurricanes shift, making them more exposed to the risk of outages. The average person in the Boston, Houston and New Orleans metro areas could see an increase in expected outages of more than 70 percent per decade, the analysis found. In Tampa, it’s even higher, and in Miami, residents could see a 119 percent increase.

Hurricanes get a lot of attention from utilities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, said Andrea Staid, a research leader in energy systems and climate analysis at the Electric Power Research Institute, who worked on the study.

But the analysis can help energy companies plan for future improvements, she said. “It motivates them even more because it shows what can happen if we don’t adapt,” Dr. Staid said, “if we don’t take climate considerations into account when planning our energy system.”

According to Climate Central, the number of weather-related power outages has nearly doubled in the past decade. Most major power outages between 2000 and 2023 were caused by extreme weather and 14 percent of which were caused by tropical cyclones and hurricanes.

Some of the counties at highest risk for more frequent power outages, such as Broward County in Florida, Wilkinson County in Mississippi, and Hyde County in North Carolina, also have the following issues: highest levels of social vulnerabilityaccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those counties have demographic and socioeconomic factors, such as poverty and lack of access to transportation, that can negatively impact communities that experience natural disasters.

Joan Casey, an associate professor of public health at the University of Washington, said power outages increase the risk for people with underlying health conditions. A lack of power can quickly push vulnerable people, such as those using electricity-dependent respirators, from relative safety to danger.

The map has limitations. Researchers used the worst-case scenario for future climate change as projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and considered a static infrastructure network without considering possible changes that could harden the energy system, such as burying pipes underground, reinforcing poles or installing community solar.

But Karthik Balaguru, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and co-creator of the map, pointed out that while it is a worst-case model, what research suggests that by mid-century we will be closer to this model than to any other.

And hurricanes aren’t the only risk. Last week, a report A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists has found that by 2050, another climate risk, sea level rise, could expose more than 1,600 key buildings and services to flooding twice a year, including more than 150 power stations.

“It’s a wake-up call that we need to address our energy system and make it much more reliable and resilient to climate-related stresses,” said Kristina Dahl, a principal climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy Program and a co-author of the report.

Dr Casey said we can take significant steps now to invest in our grid, particularly with solar and battery storage that can deliver power at a community level. But that won’t be enough.

“We need to stop burning fossil fuels,” Dr. Casey said. “That’s pretty much the answer.”