The United States will face more deadly storms and the country needs to improve management of these events, experts said Wednesday as Texas and other states grappled with winter storms that surpassed all predictions from utilities, governments and millions of terrified citizens.
This week’s storms – and those coming to the east of the country – fit a pattern of extreme events triggered by climate change, further showing that local, state, and federal authorities have not done enough to prevent themselves. prepare for the most extreme and dangerous weather.
At least two dozen people have died this week, some of them from fire or carbon monoxide poisoning while trying to warm themselves in their homes. In Oklahoma City, an arctic air mass dropped the temperature in the state capital to -25 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit).
“This is a different kind of storm,” said Kendra Clements, one of the people in Oklahoma City who opened their corporate buildings to protect the homeless, some of whom arrived with signs of frostbite, hypothermia and icicles in their hair. The scene anticipated what social service providers and governments described as increasing needs of the most vulnerable as the weather and natural disasters worsen.
Other Americans are at risk. Power systems of all types failed in the extreme cold, including natural gas-fired power plants that were taken out of service and, to a lesser extent, wind turbines that jammed and stopped working. More than 100 million people live in areas with winter weather warnings, guards, or warnings, and blackouts are expected to continue for days in some parts of the country.
The crisis raised the alarm for energy grids across the country: As climate change worsens, severe conditions are emerging that exceed historic precedents. Texas, for example, expects its energy demand to peak in the middle of summer, not the worst winter, like this week.
The severe storms came as President Joe Biden prepares to invest up to $ 2 trillion in clean energy and infrastructure over four years. Biden has pledged to upgrade the U.S. power grid so that it is carbon-free by 2035, to insulate buildings, repair roads, and install electric vehicle charging stations.
“Building a resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather and a changing climate will play an integral role” in creating jobs and in Biden’s goal of achieving a “net zero-emission future,” the company said. secretary Wednesday. White House press officer Jen Psaki.
The storms have garnered a lot of attention this week, especially as they impacted COVID-19 vaccinations in addition to freezing Americans. But that’s not to say they don’t occur more often, according to experts.
“This was definitely an anomaly,” but one that is likely to be more common due to climate change, said Sara Eftekharnejad, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Syracuse University.
“You probably need to improve your schedule as we are starting to see more and more extreme weather events across the country,” he said, whether it was extreme cold in Texas or the intense heat wave that sparked the California wildfires last year.
Improving forecasting, both in the medium and long term, would help prevent catastrophic outages like the current power outages in Texas and other states, as well as large-scale storage systems that can provide electricity when demand spikes and diversify power sources, Eftekharnejad and other experts said.
Climate change also affects military preparedness. Hurricane damage in 2018 at Tyndall AFB in Florida and the 2019 flooding at Offutt AFB in Nebraska prompted the Pentagon to send troops to Great Britain for training.
Another 2018 hurricane that hit North Carolina’s Lejeune field, home to a third of the Marine Corps’ assets, caused massive damage and affected overall training, U.S. military leaders concluded.
The Texas and other states disaster “reminds us that our country’s critical infrastructure is vulnerable to extreme weather events and that we can no longer be deaf to the investment in resilience needed to protect it,” said Senator Tom Carper. Democrat of Delaware. and who chairs the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. Carper met Biden at the White House last week.
“The costs associated with tackling climate change and improving our resilience to infrastructure will always be less than the costs of rebuilding or not acting,” added Carper.
Meanwhile, federal authorities are analyzing the operation of the electrical system during the storm that hit states from Louisiana to Minnesota.
In Texas, where wind power is gaining momentum, wind turbines are often not equipped to withstand low temperatures for long periods of time, as is the case in Iowa and other cold weather conditions. Adjusting them slightly to withstand freezing temperatures is a necessary step in dealing with climate change, said Roy McCann, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Arkansas.
While some Republican politicians, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, have tried to attribute the power outage to wind and solar power, most of the state’s power is produced in traditional thermal power plants, usually natural gas, which are the largest problem.
“The whole system was bypassed,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas.