Weathering climate change through lasting collaboration

Nearly every week, we hear about extreme weather situations. High temperatures, flash floods and raging wildfires are making headlines. We all will need to pay more attention to is how these events impact our power grids. A recent Recode podcast with Rebecca Heilweil did a wonderful job of explaining power grid basics and how climate change can impact grid operations and safety. She also walked listeners through ways in which high temperatures can overburden the power system, expand or melt wires, cause transformers to fail or result in devastating power outages and wildfires.

Rebecca points out that as a nation, we must get better at predicting how much energy we need at any given moment, so we can then quickly adapt to those needs. While we are making good progress with infrastructure funding, she states that we must get better at bringing together the large number of public and private entities involved in the needed transformation. I consider the need for much closer engagement and interaction an important point, and would add that lasting, collaborative partnerships between public and private entities will be a must to create the efficient, resilient and sustainable grids all of us will need to weather climate change going forward.