The risk of hurricane-induced power outages could increase by 50% in some areas of the United States, including Puerto Rico, due to climate change in the coming decades, according to young analysis.
Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute mapped how future hurricanes could affect power supplies, allowing residents to see how vulnerable their electricity is.
The research comes on the heels of Hurricane Beryl breaking records as the first Category 4 and 5 storm to form in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm leveled islands in the Caribbean, killing at least eight people and leaving vulnerable island communities in ruins. On Friday, it reached the Yucatan Peninsula, and its forecast track suggests it could hit northern Mexico and the Texas Gulf Coast this weekend.
“These hurricanes can cause really catastrophic power outages,” said Julian Rice, a data scientist at the national lab who helped develop the map. Those outages can have knock-on effects, he said, such as reducing access to health care and cutting off electricity used to heat and cool homes.
The researchers used computer in the model nearly a million hurricanes below simulated climate scenarios. The models projected factors such as humidity, wind and sea surface temperature under various possible global warming scenarios between 2066 and 2100.
The Pacific Northwest team then worked with the Energy Research Institute, a nonprofit group focused on electricity research, to pair these mock hurricanes with an outage model trained on holiday data of 23 hurricanes to hit the United States in the past decade.
Forecasts indicate that increasingly stronger and wetter storms, driven by fossil fuel burning, will make landfall more frequent and push further inland, with tangible impacts on the grid. In these scenarios, increased precipitation clogs the soil and weighs down tree canopies. Trees can easily be uprooted or become unstable, falling on power lines or causing landslides that damage electrical infrastructure.
In the coastal areas of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, the belt of potential climate-driven storms and hurricanes is projected to shift upward, exposing them to the risk of outages more often. The average person in the Boston, Houston and New Orleans metropolitan areas could see expected holiday events increase more than 70 percent per decade, according to the analysis. In Tampa, it’s even higher, and in Miami, residents could see a 119 percent increase.
Hurricanes draw a lot of attention from utilities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, said Andrea Staid, principal investigator in energy systems and climate analysis at the Electric Power Research Institute, who helped write the study.
But the analysis could help energy companies plan future improvements, he said. “It motivates them even more because it shows what can happen if we don’t adapt,” said Dr. Steid, “if we don’t take climate considerations into account when designing our energy system.”
Over the past decade, the number of weather-related power outages has nearly doubled, according to Climate Central. Most major blackouts between 2000 and 2023 were caused by extreme weather and 14 percent of these were caused by tropical cyclones and hurricanes.
Some of the counties at highest risk for more frequent power outages — such as Broward County, Fla., Wilkinson County, Miss. and Hyde County, NC – have too higher levels of social vulnerability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These counties have demographic and socioeconomic factors, such as poverty and lack of access to transportation, that can negatively impact communities experiencing natural disasters.
Joan Casey, an associate professor of public health at the University of Washington, said blackouts increase the risk for people with underlying conditions. A lack of power can quickly take vulnerable people, such as those who use ventilators that depend on electricity, from relative safety to a dangerous situation.
The map has limitations. The researchers used the worst-case future climate scenario put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and looked at a static infrastructure network without factoring in potential changes that could harden the electricity system, such as burying lines underground, strengthening poles or the installation of solar energy on a community scale.
But Karthik Balaguru, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and co-creator of the map, pointed out that while it’s a worst-case model, some research suggests that we are closer to this model than any other at mid-century.
And hurricanes aren’t the only danger. Last week, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that by 2050, a different climate risk, sea level rise, could expose more than 1,600 critical buildings and services to flooding twice a year, including more than 150 electrical substations.
“It’s a wake-up call that we need to deal with our electricity system and make it much more reliable and much more resilient to climate stresses,” said Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the report.
Dr Casey said we could take significant steps now to invest in our grid, particularly with solar and battery storage that can provide energy at a community scale. But that won’t be enough.
“We need to stop burning fossil fuels,” Dr. Casey said. “That’s pretty much the answer.”
