More than one million people in the region were left without power due to this and other damage. The region is still dealing with the effects of the storm and the oppressive heat. Entergy New Orleans, the main utility, said that it could take several weeks to restore full service.
Ida followed the record-setting heatwaves in the Pacific Northwest in June. During which high electricity demand knocked out some power supply in certain areas, utilities had to institute rolling outages in order to avoid worsening the problem. This closely followed outages that occurred in Texas in February that left four million people without power for several days. The cold temperatures caused a surge of demand and frozen natural-gas gathering lines.
In California, utilities are now able to turn off electricity lines in high winds or fire dangers. This is in an effort to prevent a downed line causing another deadly inferno, like the Camp Fire which nearly decimated Paradise.
Climate change has made each of these disasters more likely or exacerbated. They have all affected our electricity systems in different ways. These include creating demand spikes and knocking out power plants.
Each issue is unique and requires expensive solutions. They all have one thing in common: The need to create a modernized, robust and interconnected power generation system and delivery system capable of maintaining electricity supply during severe and increasingly frequent extreme weather events.
It's not just an inconvenience to lose power in heat waves, floods, storms, or fires. It is often a matter for life or death.
Weatherization is necessary to ensure that power plants can operate safely in both hot and cold conditions. Operators need to be able to spot and avoid potential problems by updating grids with software and sensors.
To ensure there is enough power for homes and businesses, we need to create a wider range of electricity sources as well as more energy storage. We must also tie up our scattered, creaking systems to increase redundancy between our power plants as well as the towers and lines that carry electricity to wherever it is needed.
