Lessons Learned from Past Blackouts

Climate change has caused extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and powerful winter storms to increase in both intensity and frequency. As more regions across the country face extended power outages due to these events, we are confronted with the harsh reality that a centralized grid is not well suited to meet the growing need for climate resiliency.

Recently, we saw this across the state of Texas, where record-low temperatures and two severe winter storms forced the grid operator to institute power shut-offs for millions of people in order to prevent the collapse of the entire grid. The traditional centralized hub-and-spoke architecture of the power grid needs support, and distributed energy resource (DER) systems like microgrids have the potential to do just that, providing local resiliency while simultaneously easing the grid’s load during emergencies.