Trump Wins Another Fake Award—but He Actually Deserves This One

And that hints at another thing that could be done to eliminate these outages: a more interconnected grid. That was one of the biggest factors in 2021 in Texas, Kurland noted. “The Texas power grid, ERCOT, is mostly isolated from the rest of the United States, so there weren’t a lot of connections there to be able to bring electricity to Texas during this storm.” If the goal is to build resilience to extreme weather events, we need “a power grid that’s bigger than the weather,” Kurland said. With better transmission lines connecting different regions, it doesn’t matter if the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow, or intense cold dampens fossil fuel production in a particular location, because “you are now able to distribute electricity from one side of the United States to the other.”

Microgrids connected to the main grid, as well as better energy storage, could also play a role. And then there’s the possibility of burying the power lines, which would not only solve the problem of lines sagging under the ice in winter, but also stray sparks causing wildfires in other seasons. This is not feasible everywhere, Kurland stressed, pointing to water tables and local geology. But even for such inhospitable locations, there are different types of cables that are more advanced, less vulnerable to sagging, etc. “There are certain incentives that the federal government and states can apply to be able to unlock these types of advanced technologies on the transportation system.”

However, when it comes to federal incentives, Kurland and Thompson noted that a large number of policies that could make households and the power grid less vulnerable to severe weather have recently been rolled back, or associated funds have been delayed. This is true not only for, say, offshore wind projects, but also for weather protection programs that could both help reduce pressure on the grid during cold spells and help people survive brief outages when they occur. “Last month, a number of states were still trying to get this funding for cold snaps and extreme weather events like this,” Kurland said. He highlighted the funds already intended for States via the weatherization assistance program, the release of which is scheduled for June 2025, and which had still not arrived at the end of December. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Energy proposed scrapping the program altogether.