Lessons Learned from Past Blackouts

Climate change has caused extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and powerful winter storms to increase in both intensity and frequency. Just this year, we saw this across the state of Texas, where record-low temperatures and two severe winter storms forced the grid operator to institute power shut-offs for millions of people to prevent the collapse of the entire grid. More recently, we’ve seen this in New Orleans, where communities were without power for weeks on end following the destruction of Hurricane Ida. As more regions across the country face extended power outages due to these events, we are confronted with…