The country’s power grid needs updating — not just in Houston

Poles, lines and other infrastructure around the country are aging, and subject to damage from today's more extreme weather.

Four days after Hurricane Beryl struck, nearly a million people in Texas are still without power, mainly centered on and around Houston.

The power company, CenterPoint Energy, said it expects to be able to restore 80% of the outages by Sunday, but that still means hundreds of thousands of people could be without power into next week — and there’s a heat advisory in effect, with the heat index today hovering around 100 degrees. 

Texas has been in the news a lot in the last few years for major power outages, but power grids around the country are becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

And a lot of work needs to be done to make them more resilient, as most of the power grid we use today was built more than 50 years ago.

“So, we have lots of old power lines, often on wooden poles, lots of old transformers, lots of old equipment,” said Daniel Cohan, an environmental engineering professor at Rice University in Houston. Cohan added many of the old poles and lines are also near trees, and “all of that is at big risk when we have winds that gust up over 80 miles an hour, like they did in this storm.”

As climate change makes storms more extreme, Cohan said much of our existing power infrastructure needs to be replaced.

“Really, it comes down to building out stronger poles, stronger switches, having systems that can better sense where the outages are, so crews can respond more quickly,” Cohan said.

Utilities also need to invest in shoring up the grid so it can handle increased demand when temperatures soar — or when they plummet.

But Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said for now at least, power outages from storm damage are more common.

“The vast majority of times when people lose power, it’s because of failure on the transmission or in the distribution system,” Rhodes said, “the small wires and poles that take electricity the last mile to your home or business.”

So, Rhodes said, if the goal is to keep the power on, “we really need to focus on hardening the distribution network.”

Rhodes said that needs to start in neighborhoods where power goes down the most often, because utilities aren’t going to be able to overhaul the whole system at once.

“This is not something that happens in an order of weeks or months,” Rhodes said. “This is something that’s going to take years to develop and potentially, you know, decades to fully roll out.”

For one thing, getting regulatory approval for these kinds of projects can take a long time. 

And they’re also expensive, said Ramteen Sioshansi, an electrical engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

“At the end of the day, someone has to pay for these types of investments to make electricity supply more reliable,” Sioshansi said. “And so, there’s always this trade-off.”

A trade off between wanting to make electricity more reliable, he said, and wanting to keep it as affordable as possible.