Another extreme weather event, a new trial for Texas’s infamous power grid. With temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, residents have turned up their air conditioners, forcing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which manages the state’s electrical grid, to ask customers to limit power consumptionso that the system does not crash.
And what a unique grid it is. The United States actually has three different grids: those to the west and east roughly bisect the country. But Texas broke away from all that and chose to run its own operations to… avoid regulation. That means energy suppliers not be confronted with fines for not supplying electricity, as they do in regulated states. And because it’s not closely connected to its neighbors’ energy grids, Texas can’t import much power from elsewhere when demand peaks, such as during this heat wave or a cold snap. This isolationist attitude makes it ill-prepared to endure extreme climate change.
“Texas is once again in a unique position where they’ve basically isolated themselves from the rest of the network,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School.
This has put the state in an increasingly annoying feedback loop: As summers heat up, people need to use more air conditioning to avoid discomfort and heat sickness. But that requires more energy, resulting in more emissions that further heat the planet and ultimately increase the demand for air conditioning. “The hotter it gets, the more we run the AC and the less reliable the network becomes,” Wagner says.
This will be a problem all over the world, especially in economically developing countries, where more people are joining the middle class and able to pay for technologies such as air conditioning. “AC is really crucial — it’s absolutely life-saving,” said Edith de Guzman of the University of California, Los Angeles, director and co-founder of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative. “We are entering an unprecedented period: not only is the frequency of heat waves increasing, but of course the intensity is also increasing.”
That makes it more critical than ever for people to have access to air conditioning – and the electricity to run the machines, especially those with pre-existing conditions. Asthma, for example, can be made worse by the formation of ozone as the temperature rises. And the bodies of the elderly and the very young are not as efficient at cooling themselves, putting them at greater risk. “Heat is the biggest weather-related killer in an average year in the United States,” de Guzman says. “It is an underreported problem. Illnesses and deaths caused by heat should not be diagnosed as such.” Heat stress, for example, can make a heart attack more likely, but heat isn’t necessarily the culprit.
But the old power grids in the US remain hopelessly unprepared. The Texas grid, like any other, must constantly balance supply and demand, which varies wildly throughout the day. “From my point of view, it’s more interesting than rising demand that demand occurs at coinciding peaks,” said David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who co-authored a study. important report last year on the US grid. “Not only is there higher demand, but it’s right when it’s already the critical point for the net.”