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Argentina's Blackout and the Storm-Battered Future of the Grid

posted by martyb on Monday June 24 2019, @11:15AM   
from the need-more-redundancy dept.

Fnord666 writes:

Early Sunday morning, all of mainland Argentina lost power in an "unprecedented" blackout event that left most of the country's 44 million citizens in the dark until the evening. The blackout also extended to Uruguay (which is connected to Argentina's power grid) and limited parts of Chile. Although the exact cause of the blackout is still being investigated, Argentina experienced heavy rains over the weekend, and there is reason to believe that the inclement weather played a starring role in the largest blackout in recent history.

Extreme weather events are a leading cause of blackouts around the world, and the blackout in Argentina is a reminder that our electric grids aren't ready to handle the increasing intensity of storms resulting from climate change. Although the United States isn't likely to see a nationwide blackout like the one that hit Argentina, localized blackouts in the United States have increased in both frequency and duration in recent years. This is due in no small part to massive forest fires, snow storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes that cause localized blackouts often affecting tens of thousands of people.

"There is clear evidence that extreme weather events have increased over the past 20 years, and so have the number of outages and the number of customer hours out of service," says Alison Silverstein, an independent energy consultant and previous advisor to the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. "We need to accept this and do a better job at helping customers and communities survive these growing outages and threats."

https://www.wired.com/story/argentinas-blackout-and-the-storm-battered-future-of-the-grid/

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Original Submission

• Yeah...No. Yeah...No. (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:34AM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:34AM (#859620)

  https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/weather-climate [epa.gov]

  Parent

• Re:Yeah...No. Re:Yeah...No. (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @08:36PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @08:36PM (#859845)

  Records collected since the late 1800s suggest that the actual number of hurricanes per year has not increased.

  Parent

  • Re:Yeah...No. (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @03:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @03:55PM (#860127)

    I can pick and choose too. Except you only get one quote out of the whole summary. Oops.

    From https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/weather-climate [epa.gov] :

    Average temperatures have risen across the contiguous 48 states since 1901, with an increased rate of warming over the past 30 years.
    Eight of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. Average global temperatures show a similar trend, and all of the top 10 warmest years on record worldwide have occurred since 1998.

    Many extreme temperature conditions are becoming more common. Since the 1970s, unusually hot summer days (highs) have become more common over the last few decades in the United States. Unusually hot summer nights (lows) have become more common at an even faster rate. This trend indicates less “cooling off” at night. Although the United States has experienced many winters with unusually low temperatures, unusually cold winter temperatures have become less common—particularly very cold nights (lows). Record-setting daily high temperatures have become more common than record lows. The decade from 2000 to 2009 had twice as many record highs as record lows.

    Total annual precipitation has increased over land areas in the United States and worldwide. Since 1901, precipitation has increased at an average rate of 0.08 inches per decade over land areas worldwide. However, shifting weather patterns have caused certain areas, such as the Southwest, to experience less precipitation than usual.

    In recent years, a higher percentage of precipitation in the United States has come in the form of intense single-day events. The prevalence of extreme single-day precipitation events remained fairly steady between 1910 and the 1980s but has risen substantially since then.

    Tropical storm activity in the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico has increased during the past 20 years.

    Increases and decreases in the frequency and magnitude of river flood events vary by region. Floods have generally become larger across parts of the Northeast and Midwest and smaller in the West, southern Appalachia, and northern Michigan. Large floods have become more frequent across the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and parts of the northern Great Plains, and less frequent in the Southwest and the Rockies.

    Parent