A nasty circle: A warming atmosphere and diminished power reliability

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has issued its second important report within a month. "Power Failure: How climate change puts our electricity at risk—and what we can do about it" raises some important questions. As science has been telling us for years, extreme weather events due to climate disruption will increase over time. And "global weirding" (as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman refers to global warming) seems to already have visited too many of us in the Mid-Atlantic.

Concerns about climate change are not new. But the UCS report connects some dots in a way that spells big trouble ahead: The country's infrastructure for distributing electricity from power plants to homes and businesses (a.k.a. the grid) is aging. And its age increases its vulnerability to extreme weather events.

A few examples from the report:

• Power plants are vulnerable to water-related risks. Because fossil fuel and nuclear power plants rely on copious amounts of water for cooling, they are invariably located on rivers or bays. Many of these plants are ancient, relatively speaking, and were not engineered for warmer water.
• Sea level rise threatens coastal power facilities in particular. Climate Central reports that about 100 power plants and substations are within four feet of local high tide. And with science predicting likely sea level rises of 1.6 to 6.6 feet above 1992 levels by 2099, we'd better be making some new plans.
• Heat waves are a double whammy: reducing efficiency at power plants while simultaneously increasing demand ("Honey, it's too hot in here! Turn up the A/C.")

This is where it hits home for me, literally. I experienced days-long power outages from  Superstorm Sandy in late October 2012 and again this past winter, the third snowiest on record for Philadelphia.

So what's to be done? We need to find the collective will to "harden" our electricity infrastructure—burying power lines and building sea walls, that type of thing. But it's expensive. So let's really fix the problem and move toward a cleaner energy future, where generating electricity doesn't make climate change worse, which further threatens our aging grid—a positive feedback loop we just can't accept.

See PennFuture's Clean Energy Wins report, just released in March, that offers a roadmap as to how Pennsylvania can displace fossil fuels with clean energy and energy efficiency.

Please help keep the lights on -- and the planet safer.

This offending branch that knocked out my neighborhood's power for 2+ days in February

Joy Bergey is PennFuture's federal policy director and is based in Philadelphia. She tweets @joybergey.