Abstract
When a city is lashed by storm or swamped by epic rains, there's at least one predictable moment in the chaos: the lights go out. In this article, we focus on the challenge of protecting assets from storms and floods in the era of climate breakdown. This often involves physical fortification or smarter placement. To understand the policies and decisions involved, we examine recovery efforts following storm- or flood-based outages that occurred this century in the state of Texas in the United States and the state of Queensland in Australia. We first describe the outages, their consequences, and the policy recommendations and responses that followed. We then evaluate the recovery processes, focusing on the challenge of protecting assets like substations and transmission structures. We find that each jurisdiction could do more to incorporate forward-looking climate data, to match the level of government authority to better fit the desired function, and to capably fund the work to be done.
Highlights
When a city is lashed by storm or swamped by epic rains, there’s at least one predictable moment in the chaos: the lights go out
We focus on threats posed to the power grid by storms and floods—two prevalent hazards amplified by the climate crisis
To understand the policies and decisions involved, we examine recovery efforts following storm- or flood-based outages that occurred this century in the state of Texas in Building a Climate-Resilient Power Grid the United States and the state of Queensland in Australia
Summary
When a city is lashed by storm or swamped by epic rains, there’s at least one predictable moment in the chaos: the lights go out. The Queensland Commission recommended that the state or local government identify “flood plains” and suggested that facilities, including substations, be fortified for flooding or avoid the areas It made no call for integrating future climate impacts into the maps. The federal government has released a variety of tools, including the National Partnership Agreement for Natural Disaster Resilience, the National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy; the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework; and the National Land Use Planning Guidelines for Disaster Resilient Communities (Australian Government, 2015; Planning Institute Australia, 2015; Australian Government, 2018) They all refer to the need to build resilience to climate change but provide only high-level guidance to state, territory, and local governments—National informational tools include the AFRIP and the yet-to-be-completed Electricity Sector Climate Information Project to develop high-quality climate data and simulations to support power system resilience (CSIRO). These governments should consider mandating use of certain resilience technologies as a way of driving modernization in the electricity sector
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