The country’s electricity grid needs to be modernized

Four days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall, nearly a million people in Texas are still without power, primarily in and around Houston.

The power company, CenterPoint Energy, said it expected 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 a heat advisory is in effect, with the heat index hovering around 100 degrees today.

Texas has been in the news in recent years for major power outages, but the country’s power grids are becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

And there is still much to be done to make them more resilient, because most of the electricity grid we use today was built more than 50 years ago.

“So we have a lot of old power lines, often on wooden poles, a lot of old transformers, a lot of old equipment,” said Daniel Cohan, a professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston. Cohan added that many of the old poles and lines are also near trees, and “all of that is at great risk when we have wind gusts that are over 80 mph, like we did in this storm.”

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

“Really, it’s about building stronger poles, stronger switches, having systems that can better detect where outages are, so crews can respond more quickly,” Cohan said.

Utilities also need to invest in strengthening the grid so it can handle increased demand when temperatures rise — or when they fall.

But Joshua Rhodes, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, said that for now at least, power outages due to storm damage are more common.

“Most of the time when people lose power, it’s because of a failure in the transmission or distribution system,” Rhodes said, “the little wires and poles that carry electricity the last mile to your home or business.”

So, Rhodes said, if the goal is to keep the electricity on, “we really need to focus on strengthening the distribution grid.”

Rhodes said it needs to start in neighborhoods where power outages are most frequent because utilities won’t be able to retrofit the entire system at once.

“This is not something that happens in a matter of weeks or months,” Rhodes said. “This is something that will take years to develop and potentially decades to fully deploy.”

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

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

“Ultimately, someone has to fund these types of investments to make the electricity supply more reliable,” Sioshansi said. “So there’s always a trade-off.”

It’s a trade-off between making electricity more reliable, he said, and keeping it as affordable as possible.