Another extreme weather event, another trial for Texas’ infamous electrical grid. As temperatures have soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, residents have cranked up their air conditioners, forcing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which runs the state’s grid, to ask customers to limit power usage, lest the system crash.
And what a singular grid it is. The United States actually has three distinct grids: The ones in the west and east roughly cut the country in half. But Texas divorced itself from all that, opting to run its own operations to avoid regulation. That means power providers don’t face penalties for failing to deliver electricity, as they do in regulated states. And because it’s not intricately connected to its neighbors’ energy grids, Texas can’t import lots of power from elsewhere when demand spikes, like during this heat wave or a cold snap. That isolationist stance has left it ill-prepared to weather the extremes of climate change.
“Texas, once again, is in a unique position where basically they’ve isolated themselves from the rest of the grid,” says Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School.
This has caught the state up in an increasingly nasty feedback loop: As summers warm, people need to run more AC to avoid discomfort and heat illness. But that requires more energy, which results in more emissions that further heat the planet and ultimately increase demand for air conditioning. “The hotter it gets, the more we run the AC, and the less reliable the grid becomes,” says Wagner.
This will be a problem all over the world, especially in economically developing nations, where more people are joining the middle class and are able to pay for technologies like air conditioning. “AC is really critical—it’s absolutely life-saving,” says University of California, Los Angeles’ Edith de Guzman, director and cofounder of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative. “We’re entering into an unprecedented period: Not only is the frequency of heat waves increasing, but the intensity, of course, is also increasing.”
That’s making it more critical than ever for people to have access to air conditioning—and have the electricity to run the machines—especially those with preexisting conditions. Asthma, for instance, can be exacerbated by the formation of ozone when temperatures rise. And the bodies of elderly and very young people aren’t as efficient as cooling themselves, putting them at more risk. “Heat is the biggest weather-related killer in an average year in the United States,” says de Guzman. “It's an underreported problem. Illnesses and deaths that are caused by heat may not be diagnosed as such.” For example, heat stress may make a heart attack more likely, but heat won’t necessarily be fingered as the culprit.
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But the ancient electrical grids in the US remain woefully unprepared. The Texas grid, like any other, needs to constantly balance supply and demand, which varies wildly throughout the day. “From my point of view, more interesting than the rising demand is that the demand happens at coincident peaks,” says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who coauthored a major report on the US grid last year. “Not only is there a higher demand, but it’s at exactly the time that’s already the critical point for the grid.”
The solution is to either reduce or time-shift some of that demand, Victor says. In Texas right now, demand is spiking in the late afternoon, when people return home from work and crank up the AC. That’s why Ercot has asked customers to cut energy use between 2 pm and 8 pm to bring the demand in line with the supply. In a statement to WIRED, an Ercot spokesperson wrote that “ways to reduce electricity use during peak times include turning up your thermostat a degree or two, if comfortable, and postponing running major appliances or pool pumps during the requested time frame.”
With the proliferation of smart thermostats, utilities can also remotely turn down customers’ temperatures to reduce demand. (This actually happened in Texas last summer, confusing customers who didn’t realize they’d opted in to such a program.) Another strategy, called precooling or preheating, encourages customers to turn on their AC units or heaters before peak demand so that their home reaches a comfortable temperature sooner and only has to be maintained later.
Unfortunately, American homes often lack sufficient insulation to keep the heat out and the cool in. This makes precooling less efficient—no point in switching on the AC before demand spikes if your house is just going to heat back up in an hour. Swaths of structures in the US were built with cheap energy in mind: Why waste time and money sealing a house when you can just crank up the air conditioning? “We are in a world where we rely basically almost exclusively on air conditioning to cool wooden shacks,” says Wagner. “The sort of more systemic change is, in fact, insulation. Yes, you still have AC available, sure. But you’ll run it much, much less.”
While we’re at it, we should also paint roofs white, explore reflective pavement coatings to bounce the sun’s energy back into space, and deploy an appliance cherished among climate nerds: the heat pump. This highly efficient device runs entirely on electricity, extracting heat from outdoor air to warm a home and then reversing that flow in the summer to act like an air conditioner.
Scientists are also researching how residents of high-rises might grow crops under their rooftop solar panels, simultaneously generating power and food while cooling the building. Energy experts envision a future in which customers will become more active participants in the grid—not just users of electricity, but generators and distributors of it. For example, rooftop solar panels might charge up home batteries and electric cars sitting in garages, creating a sort of distributed network a utility could tap into when it needs more power to send to other homes. Instead of a spike in demand bringing the grid to its knees, a utility could use batteries all over a city to supply on-demand power.
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City officials can also fix the spaces around homes. The “urban heat island effect” is the result of structures like buildings and pavement absorbing the sun’s energy during the day and releasing it slowly at night. With each passing day of a heat wave, the temperature inches up. “Staying hotter into the night means that the human body is not always able to recover,” says de Guzman, of UCLA. On a hot day in Los Angeles, for example, officials can expect an 8 percent rise in mortality above normal levels. “But occasionally, we see that when it’s multiple days—you’ve got 3-, 4-, 5-day heat waves—that number can go up to 30 percent. So escalating back-to-back extreme heat days are much more devastating,” she continues.
The heat island effect can be mitigated by creating more green spaces, in which plants “sweat” to cool the local air. Growing trees around buildings also provides shade, which makes sequential days of heat more bearable and allows the occupants to cut down on AC use.
These local and homeowner-led changes will help, but the bigger fixes will need to happen at the state and national levels. The US was oh so close to getting some of these fixes on a large scale. Last year the Biden administration requested $10 billion to create a Civilian Climate Corps, which among other things would have put Americans to work insulating homes and retrofitting cities to withstand extreme heat. But like much of the Democrats’ climate agenda, the proposal has stalled.
In Texas, grid operators could better connect their grid to their neighbors’. “If they want to have more interconnections with the rest of the country, then they probably would have more stability in the Texas grid,” says Victor. But that would open the state up to more regulation. If Texas officials want to continue to go it alone, they can keep up their momentum when it comes to deploying renewables. In the first quarter of this year, wind and solar accounted for a record 34 percent of the power Ercot transmitted, according to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The growth of solar power is what has in large part kept the grid alive during this heat wave.
There’s also a bigger-picture grid problem: As utilities adopt more renewables, the supply-demand calculus gets extra complicated because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. The ideal grid could shuttle energy over vast distances, for instance from the sunny Southwest in the late afternoon to the Midwest, where it’s two hours later and may already be dark.
But at the moment, the national grid just isn’t equipped to handle that. Although the price of renewables has dropped enough that it’s now economically feasible to site solar and wind all over the place, not just where it’s sunniest and windiest, these installations can’t yet supply enough power to outright replace fossil fuels. Operators still rely on natural gas to fill the gaps when renewable energy isn’t available. A future all-green grid will need lots of long-distance high-voltage lines that connect regions to make sure power can be ported where it’s needed, without having to fall back on gas.
Texas is a bright-red warning light, showing how climate change is already making American summers miserable. Extreme heat will only get worse from here, but there are local, national, and global ways to adapt. “I would say there’s no silver bullet,” says de Guzman. “We really need to diversify that portfolio for cooling in as many ways as possible.”