Researchers have uncovered troubling trends of increasing power outages during severe weather events across the United States.
This comprehensive study stresses the urgent need for communities to adapt and prepare for the escalating impacts of climate change on essential services.
Weather-Related Power Outages and Climate Change
Understanding how severe weather affects power outages is crucial for developing effective hazard response plans, according to a study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, published today (January 22) in PLOS Climate.
Across the U.S., large-scale power outages often happen during severe weather events. These outages can have serious economic and health consequences, disrupting essential services such as medical equipment, heating, and air conditioning. As climate change leads to more frequent and intense weather events, identifying patterns and trends in power failures is essential to help communities better prepare and allocate resources.
Weather Events and Power Disruptions
In this study, first author Vivian Do, a PhD candidate in environmental health sciences, and colleagues compiled data from 2018-2020 on severe weather events (including rain, snow, heat, cold, cyclones, and wildfire) and large-scale power outages lasting eight hours or more for over 1600 counties across the country. The data reveal that nearly 75 percent of these counties experienced major power outages alongside severe weather events during this three-year period, and over 50 percent of counties experienced outages alongside multiple simultaneous weather events.
Outages most commonly occurred alongside severe precipitation and heat, but the events are not distributed evenly, with precipitation-associated outages more common in the Northeast U.S. and heat-associated outages more common in the Southeast. This study also found that co-occurring outages and wildfires along the West Coast became increasingly common from 2018 to 2020.
Regional Variations and Future Research Directions
The researchers note that reliable data was not available for all U.S. counties, so information is limited in regions such as the Southwest and Mountain West. Do and colleagues suggest that further research providing additional data, along with simulations of severe weather combinations in different locations will be useful for developing mitigation and response tactics.
Do adds: “Power outages frequently co-occur with severe weather events like heavy precipitation, tropical cyclones, or multiple severe weather events simultaneously. Understanding patterns of where and when power outages and severe weather events co-occur is crucial for informing strategies to minimize societal consequences, especially as the electrical grid ages and climate change drives more severe weather events.”
Reference: “Spatiotemporal patterns of individual and multiple simultaneous severe weather events co-occurring with power outages in the United States, 2018–2020” by Vivian Do, Lauren B. Wilner, Nina M. Flores, Heather McBrien, Alexander J. Northrop and Joan A. Casey, 22 January 2025, PLOS Climate.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000523
This work was funded by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (ES009089, ES007322-22, ES007033), the National Institute on Aging (AG071024), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant (HL172608). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Additional authors include Nina Flores and Heather McBrien at Columbia Mailman; Lauren B. Wilner and Joan A. Casey at the University of Washington, Seattle; and Alexander J. Northrop at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Icahn School of Medicine in New York.
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6 Comments
I don’t believe in “climate change” simply because, up until recently, it used to be called “global warming”. That alone should tell you how “settled” the “science” around it is.
I’d look in another direction for the cause of power outages: the increase in the number of AI data-centers, crypto-farms and electric vehicles.
Oh, and the shoddy US infrastructure.
But it’s cheaper to blame it on the weather, I guess.
“This comprehensive study stresses the urgent need for communities to adapt and prepare for the escalating impacts of climate change on essential services.”
It seems that the unstated (and probably unexamined) assumption is that climate change (~0.5 Deg C in 50 years) is actually responsible for the claimed increasing power outages during severe weather events. Is it just coincidence that designs for infrastructure have an expected lifetime of a few decades? How long should we expect wooden power poles (as shown in the lede photo’) to resist decay, attack by insects and woodpeckers, flexing from winds, and weakening from road salt? That is, does an aging infrastructure play a role in the failures? What role does mature vegetation, encroaching on power-lines, play in the destruction. Does a growing population, putting more demands on the grid, from increasing load, heat components beyond their initial design limits?
” As climate change leads to more frequent and intense weather events, identifying patterns and trends in power failures is essential to help communities better prepare and allocate resources.”
Might it be that it is only an apparent increase in the frequency and intensity of weather events and is actually false? That it might be a statistical fluke resulting from the fact that low-probability events on the tails of the probability distribution function curves simply weren’t observed in the early days of electrification but are more obvious now with an expanded grid and time for the low-probability events to show up? What we need to use is a metric such as grid failures per mile of power-line or per capita, not per year.
What we have here is an example of inexperienced researchers deciding that the claimed climate change is responsible for all the negative outcomes and not spending time thinking about alternative explanations, or not doing the research necessary to prove the claims about the assumed relationships. Unless these researchers actually learn to think, they will be put out of a job by Artificial Intelligence long before their careers would otherwise be over. We are graduating a generation of technicians to whom society grants ‘sheepskins’ emblazoned with “Doctorate of Philosophy.”
It might help if other disciplines besides geology required undergraduates to read Chamberlain’s treatise:
https://www.mantleplumes.org/WebDocuments/Chamberlin1897.pdf
Shall I assume that since my forty-year old roof has begun to leak that we are experiencing heavier rainfall due to ‘climate change’? Not enough water in the 100 year-old municipal reservoir system to assure an adequate water supply for the city? Probably ‘climate change’… it couldn’t be the 300% increase in the city’s population in the last hundred years. Could it?
The article failed to mention extreme winter weather events such as the recent snowstorm which dumped up to 9″ of snow in Louisiana….it’s going to be interesting to see how the global warming gang explains that one.
At this point in time it is a statistical outlier. Only unless it keeps happening can we assign any more importance to it. Weather happens!