CA, TX Outages Show US In No Shape To Handle Oncoming Age Of Worsening Weather Extremes
When California saw widespread power blackouts last year during wildfires and a summer “heat storm”, Republican lawmakers from Texas were quick to deride the coastal state’s energy policies. “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity,” tweeted senator Ted Cruz during the record-breaking heatwave in August.
Those Republicans, including Cruz, had to swallow their words this week as a massive winter storm took out the Lone Star state’s power grid, leaving nearly 4 million people without electricity and heat amid polar temperatures. The crises in California and Texas are different, in scale and severity. One faced fire, the other an ice storm. But experts say the power outages in both states make one thing clear: neither is prepared for the chaos of the climate crisis.
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An analysis of Department of Energy data published in September found weather-related power outages are up by 67% since 2000. Climate change is expected to continue fueling hotter heatwaves, more bitter winter storms and more ferocious hurricanes in the coming decades. As both California and Texas have discovered in recent years, power plants, generators and electrical lines are not designed to withstand the catastrophes to come. And all the while, the fossil fuels that both states rely on to power these faulty systems are driving the climate crisis, and hastening infrastructural collapse. “We’re already seeing the effects of climate change,” said Sascha von Meier, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “There will be more of this and it will get worse.”
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In Texas and California, power issues have endangered elderly, poor and disabled residents most. When PG&E started pre-emptively shutting off electricity during the 2019 fire season, many disabled people found themselves in a precarious situation after their medical devices lost power and life-sustaining medications that required refrigeration began to go bad. Last year, when the heat storm triggered blackouts, the outage caused a failure at a wastewater treatment plant – forcing working-class people of color in Oakland to choose between opening windows to cool their homes, and closing them to shut out the smell as 50,000 gallons of raw sewage flowed in the nearby bay. Likewise, this week in Texas, the state’s poorest neighborhoods were the first and hardest hit by the prolonged outages.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/19/power-outages-texas-california-climate-crisis
