Heat Waves Make the Grid Less Reliable

This article was republished with permission from The National Interest. The original article can be found here.

Highlights:

• Extreme heat costs our economy more than $200 billion every year in lost labor productivity.

• Heat waves affect the power grid as well as individual homes and residential buildings. As temperatures rise, more air conditioners are turned on, resulting in increased power demand, which can push the grid to the edge.

• Renewable energy resources like solar panels paired with battery storage devices are a viable solution to contribute to grid resilience and reliability.

On June 19, a line of thunderstorms struck the northern Virginia area where I live, bringing strong winds, heavy rain, and toppling dozens of trees. As a result, I lost power in my home for more than six hours, rendering me unable to use my induction stove to cook a hot dinner for my family of four. Unfortunately, my home is not equipped with solar panels and batteries. If it were, with the proper setup, then my family would have had access to electricity during this power outage.

These thunderstorms were triggered by a heat dome, a stationary high-pressure area in which hot air is trapped, making outside air unbearable. After hitting Virginia, the heat dome moved along the East Coast, creating a dangerous heat wave that persisted until June 24. During that stretch, several record high temperatures were broken across the Northeast, with cities reaching temperatures of up to 102°F, accompanied by sweltering humidity. 

Extreme heat is the number one weather-related cause of death in the United States and its impacts extend ever farther. According to U.S. Rep. Silvia Garcia (D-Texas), “extreme heat … costs our economy more than $200 billion every year in lost labor productivity. It also jeopardizes the stability of the energy system, affects how our children perform in school, and increases the burden of local and state governments.”

Heat waves affect the power grid, as well as individual homes and residential buildings. As temperatures rise, more air conditioners are turned on, resulting in increased power demand, which can push the grid to the edge. The worst-case situation is a widespread outage, when power plants are unable to keep up and hundreds of thousands of people are forced to endure heat without electricity. 

To make the grid more resilient to extreme heat, renewable energy can be coupled with battery storage to support the power grid in the event of blackouts and mitigate the adverse effects of hot weather. Solar panels paired with batteries, in particular, are increasingly cost-competitive and very scalable—from many megawatts at one site to supply utilities to a few kilowatts on rooftops like mine. 

Installing solar panels and batteries, whether at the utility or household level, requires a significant upfront investment that can be financed and then recovered over time. The costs of solar panels and batteries have dropped considerably over the past decade, which has spurred a solar energy boom, helped along by federal incentives that seek to maximize the many benefits of clean energy like lower energy bills and reduced carbon emissions. 

The accelerated phaseout of federal tax incentives—which had been extended by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022—following the recent enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21) will make it significantly harder to finance utility-scale projects. And for households, a rooftop solar installation could cost about $9,000 more, putting added resilience out of reach just as extreme heat is becoming more frequent, more severe, more widespread, and longer in duration. 

Author: Miguel Yañez-Barnuevo