Analysis: Texas has the most weather-related power outages
TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM) - The non-partisan, non-profit Climate Central has conducted an analysis of major power outages affecting 50,000 customers or more from 2000-2021.
The organization found power outages spiked 64% in the last decade compared to the previous decade - 83% caused by weather related events. Texas is seeing the most with 180 weather-related power outages.
"The dominant factor contributing to the rise of reported outages is increase in outages associated with severe weather," Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said.
Nielsen-Gammon, with Texas A&M University, has tracked this. A graph he created shows a big spike in severe weather events causing outages occurring in the last few years.
"Spikes are concerning in one way and not in another," he said. "They're not concerning in the sense that they're not evidence of trend, they're evidence of one-off events."
He said the 2021 winter storm is a prime example.
"It does reflect that we certainly weren't weather ready in an infrastructure sense for the cold weather we experienced, so it represents vulnerability," he said.
"ERCOT has taken steps to improve resiliency, but I'm not aware of similar pushes to make our grid more resilient to thunderstorm winds or tornadoes for example," he continued.
CBS 11 reached out to try and get ERCOT's response to the new report, but a representative declined an interview.
"Larger entities are going to need to make the investment in making our electrical grid more resilient," Climate Central Meteorologist Lauren Casey said.
Moving above ground transmission lines underground and reinforcing wood power poles with stronger materials are two ways this could be done.
"There's other investments that can be made too such as in micro grids, smart technologies which have sensors that can give us a gage of stability a stability of local grids," Casey said.