by Shane Henson — August 28, 2013—The results of climate change reportedly pose significant safety issues for Americans nationwide, including weather severe enough to cause widespread power outages. A new report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) addresses this issue and evaluates the economic cost of power outages while also calling for increased cross-sector investment to make the electric grid more resilient in the face of increasingly severe weather events due to climate change.
As the DOE stresses in the report, Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages, grid resilience is increasingly important as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of severe weather. Greenhouse gas emissions are said to be elevating air and water temperatures around the world. Scientific research predicts more severe hurricanes, winter storms, heat waves, floods and other extreme weather events being among the changes in climate induced by human-related emissions of greenhouse gases.
The DOE’s timely report provides new estimates of the annual cost of power outages caused by weather. Between 2003 and 2012, weather-related outages are estimated to have cost the U.S. economy an inflation-adjusted annual average of $18 billion—$33 billion. Annual costs fluctuate significantly and are greatest in the years of major storms such as Hurricane Ike in 2008, a year in which cost estimates range from $40 billion to $75 billion, and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, a year in which cost estimates range from $27 billion to $52 billion, says the DOE.
The DOE notes that this month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the worst power outages in the United States, during which tens of millions of Americans were affected across parts of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Severe weather is the number one cause of power outages on the nation’s electric grid, which serves as the backbone of the nation’s infrastructure that delivers electric power to millions of Americans in homes, schools, offices, and factories across the United States.
Further information on federal initiatives that support the development of the technologies, policies and projects transforming the electric power industry is available on the DOE’s Smart Grid Web site.
