DISASTERS & THE POWER GRIDHurricane Helene Brought Devastation — and an Opportunity — to Appalachia’s Power Grids
As recovery efforts continue, utilities in the region need to rethink their approach to electricity in the face of climate change.
By the time that Hurricane Helene made its way hundreds of miles inland on September 27, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm. But Helene remained unusually expansive and strong, fueled by the warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The storm brought high winds and catastrophic flooding, knocking out power for more than 2 million Duke Energy customers in the Carolinas, and tearing through a region of the country that wasn’t widely seen as vulnerable to hurricane damage: the Mountain South. Asheville, North Carolina, the city hardest hit, had even appeared on lists of “climate havens” considered comparatively safe from the natural disasters whose impacts are intensified by global warming.
Over the course of the following week, more than 50,000 utility workers, with crews from 41 U.S. states and Canada, set about the heroic work to restore power. In some areas, they even transported power poles by helicopter where roads remained impassable. By Saturday, service had been restored to more than 90 percent of the customers who lost power. But some of the remaining outages may prove harder to repair, because they require the complete replacement of technically complex power infrastructure equipment. These repairs “will take potentially many weeks,” said Jeff Brooks, a Duke Energy spokesperson.
The unprecedented devastation has brought renewed attention to the problem of ensuring the resilience of America’s power grids in the face of climate change, and to the massive transformation that decarbonization, electrification, and a projected growth in electricity demand bring. Global shortages of crucial electrical equipment like transformers and circuit breakers don’t make that question any easier to figure out.
Electrical equipment and water don’t mix, so heavy flooding presents a serious threat to power grids that aren’t prepared for it. “There has been a dramatic miscalculation of risk factors here,” said Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special advisor at the Department of Energy. “So this event is going to have to prompt a wide range of new analysis on the vulnerability of various parts of the power system.”
Among the challenges that western North Carolina will face in rebuilding its grid are its geographic differences from the regions where various solutions have been tested. Norris described the region as “a mountainous area that still has a relatively decent population density.”
