Climate Change May Cause More City Blackouts as Storms Increase

Climate change may actually impact the lighting of major cities. Although most people in hurricane-prone areas are familiar with power outages caused by these storms, scientists have found that changing conditions may also impact other major metro areas.

In this case, the researchers created a computer model to predict the increasing vulnerability of power grids in major coastal cities during hurricanes. They factored in historic hurricane information with plausible scenarios for future storm behavior. In the end, they pinpointed which 27 cities will become more susceptible to blackouts.

"We provide insight into how power systems along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts may be affected by climate changes including which areas should be most concerned and which ones are unlikely to see substantial change," said Seth Guikema, one of the researchers, in a news release. "If I'm mayor of Miami, we know about hurricanes, we know about outages and our system has been adapted for it. But if I'm mayor of Philadelphia, I might say, 'Whoa, we need to be doing more about this.'"

Researchers found that not only would Miami and New Orleans suffer blackouts, but cities like New York City and Philadelphia may also experience more of these events in the future. For both New York City and Philadelphia, the 100-year storm scenario would be 50 percent higher. In other words, more people would lose power more often, and the worst storms would be substantially worse.

"The range of results demonstrates the sensitivity of the U.S. power system to changes in storm behavior," said Guikema. "Infrastructure providers and emergency managers need to plan for hurricanes in a long-term manner and that planning has to take climate change into account."

The findings are published in the journal Climatic Change.

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