• “We’re in It Alone”: Power Outages Leave Millions of Texans Desperate for Heat and Safety

    Millions of Texans suffered through Monday night without power as a massive winter blitz sent temperatures plunging, shuttered grocery stores and caused widespread outages. Texas residents said the storm — and ensuing partial collapse of the state’s power system — sapped what mental reserves they had left after eleven months of a global health crisis that has cost thousands of jobs and claimed more than 40,000 lives in the state.

  • UPDATES: More People Could Lose Electricity, Heat as Crisis Persists

    Energy experts, local leaders and residents said energy and state officials failed to properly prepare people for the mass outages coinciding with dangerous weather that’s already led to at least 10 deaths. Texas largely relies on natural gas — especially during times of high demand — to power the state. Experts say natural gas infrastructure, from pumping it out of the ground to the plants in city centers, was unprepared for the plunging temperatures brought by the winter storm.

  • Power Outages across the Plains: 4 Questions Answered about Weather-Driven Blackouts

    Amid record cold temperatures and skyrocketing energy demand, utilities across the central U.S. have ordered rolling blackouts to ration electricity, leaving millions of people without power. Weather-related power outages are increasing across the U.S. as climate change produces more extreme storms and temperature swings. States that design their buildings and infrastructure for hot weather may need to plan for more big chills, and cold-weather states can expect more heat waves. As conditions in Texas show, there’s no time to waste in getting more weather-ready.

  • Preventing Cybersecurity Disruptions by Training Workforce

    Two cybersecurity researchers have published a new book to help train employees at public utilities to recognize cybersecurity vulnerabilities and develop measures to defend their networks from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

  • Security Threats which Bind Us

    The Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) released a report last week which identifies ecological disruption as a major and underappreciated security threat and calls on the United States to reboot its national security architecture and doctrine to better respond to this evolving threat landscape.

  • Helping Industry Develop Secure Grid Technologies

    Rapid development and deployment of new technologies in the energy delivery systems marketplace make the power grid a hotbed for innovation—and an attractive target for cybercriminals. Cybersecurity researchers are working to change that by building next-generation tools for hardening the power grid—and other critical infrastructure—against attack.

  • A Key Step in Preventing a Future SolarWinds

    In the weeks since news of the SolarWinds incident became public, commentators have offered no shortage of prescriptions for responding to the incident. Natalie Thompson writes that as information continues to emerge about the scope and scale of the incident and policymakers struggle with thorny questions regarding appropriate responses, urgent attention also is needed to actions that could prevent such large-scale catastrophes in the future.

  • Tsunamis and Tsunami Warning: Recent Progress and Future Prospects

    Tsunamis are one of the most destructive disasters in the ocean. Large tsunamis are mostly generated by earthquakes, and they can propagate across the ocean without significantly losing energy. During the shoaling process in coastal areas, the wave amplitude increases dramatically, causing severe life loss and property damage. A recent paper reviews the recent research progress on earthquake-generated tsunamis, from the aspects of tsunami generation, propagation, inversion and warning.

  • Role of Dams in Reducing Global Flood Risks under Climate Change

    Flood is amongst the costliest natural disasters. Globally, flood risk is projected to increase in the future, driven by climate change and population growth. The role of dams in flood mitigation, previously unaccounted for, was found to decrease by approximately 15 percent the number of people globally exposed to historical once-in-100-year floods, downstream of dams during the twenty-first century.

  • Aging Dams Pose Growing Threat

    By 2050, most people on Earth will live downstream of tens of thousands of large dams built in the twentieth century, many of them already operating at or beyond their design life. Increasingly expensive to maintain, experts foresee a trend to decommissioning dams.

  • The SolarWinds Hack Can Directly Affect Control Systems

    Much of the initial discussion around the SolarWinds cyberattack focused on its impact on the affected information technology (IT) systems. Joe Weiss and Bob Hunter write that this overlooks an equally destructive yet unexamined operational technology (OT) portion of the attack, and much of the OT impact may not be seen for months or longer. Weiss and Hunter note that researchers have long warned about the dangers posed by OT attacks, and that Russian hackers have become extremely adept at control system cyberattacks.

  • It's Getting Hot in Here: Warming World Will Fry Power Plant Production

    There’s no doubt the Earth’s temperatures are going up. The power plants that keep air conditioners pushing out cold air could soon be in a vicious cycle in a warming world–not able to keep up with growing demands on hotter days and driving up greenhouse gas emissions to dangerous levels.

  • Finding Toxic Chemicals in Drinking Water

    Most consumers of drinking water in the United States know that chemicals are used in the treatment processes to ensure the water is safe to drink. But they might not know that the use of some of these chemicals, such as chlorine, can also lead to the formation of unregulated toxic byproducts.

  • Want Cheaper Nuclear Energy? Turn the Design Process into a Game

    Nuclear energy provides more carbon-free electricity in the United States than solar and wind combined, making it a key player in the fight against climate change. But the U.S. nuclear fleet is aging, and operators are under pressure to streamline their operations to compete with coal- and gas-fired plants. Researchers show that deep reinforcement learning can be used to design more efficient nuclear reactors.

  • Guiding Research Direction for Grid-Forming Inverters

    Power electronics—including the inverters that interface solar, wind, battery energy storage, and electric vehicles—are on track to gradually, or even entirely, displace traditional generation. In doing so, inverters will inherit new responsibilities and introduce a new set of challenges.