Record-Breaking Temperatures Strain Power Grids, Harm Vulnerable People

The story

The week of July 4th saw record-smashing temperatures across the U.S., particularly in Southern California.

The heat wave was accompanied by major power outages as demand for air conditioning stretched the grid to its limits, and Canadian health officials believe it claimed 70 lives in Quebec.

Weather vs. climate

Some people were quick to hold last week’s blistering heat up as proof of climate change, but it’s not that simple.

Whether one claims a heat spike proves climate change or a cold snap disproves it, both misconstructions are based on a conflation of weather and climate:

• Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere, and its short-term variation as measured over minutes to weeks.
• Climate is the weather of a place averaged over a period of time, often 30 years.

While efforts to link any given weather event to climate change have until recently been difficult and unreliable, a relatively new area of scientific research called “extreme event attribution“ has now matured, increasingly allowing researchers to determine to what extent climate change factors contributed to specific weather events.

Indeed, researchers at the World Weather Attribution project specialize in exactly that. Studies in recent years have found that climate change played a role in Australian heat waves in 2013, downpours in Louisiana in 2016, floods in France that same year, and many other events. Conversely, in some cases — German floods around the same time as the French ones, for example — studies have been inconclusive or found no link to climate change.

It’s too soon to know if last week’s heat wave can be attributed to climate change. What scientists do know is that we’re likely to see more such events.

The impact

Hotter nights

While it might not sound as important, overnight low temperatures are increasing at nearly twice the rate of daytime highs in the summer.

Researchers say this can be dangerous because it reduces the body’s opportunity to cool down at night. This risk is higher for vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, small children, and homeless people.

Electricity challenges

As coal plants close across the country, some observers – including senior figures in the Trump administration – have expressed concern that this will create grid reliability problems.

Grid experts have largely dismissed such concerns, and California’s utilities say last week’s outages were not based on generation availability. Rather, those outages resulted from strain on their distribution systems from record power demand.

However, Texas’ grid manager has a much smaller cushion to meet spikes in electricity demand largely because of coal plant retirement, and any further heat waves this summer will reveal whether it can manage under its current structure.

What do you think?

How, if at all, do you think regulators should address the various risks associated with climate change and extreme weather events? Hit Take Action to tell your reps what you think, then share your thoughts below.

—Sara E. Murphy

(Photo Credit: iStock.com / ugurhan)