With the modest and fairly typical nor’easter last week, many of us spent part of the day without utility power. Power outages were widely distributed across the region. Unless you were elderly, ill or reliant on home medical equipment, the outages were brief enough to amount to an inconvenient reminder of the sorry state of our power grid.
The lights go out on Cape Cod a lot and it does not seem to take much to cause an outage. If this most recent modest storm had the effect that it did, just imagine what the inevitable hurricane will do. Is it too much to ask that we are served by a power grid where the loss of power is the exception versus the expectation? Beyond our collective comfort, our economy relies on reliable power. Any hope that we have to electrify our homes and vehicles to lower carbon emissions is dependent on a much more robust grid and greater adoption of distributed generation (home solar panels paired with battery storage) than what we have now.
Not only does the grid need to become stronger, but it also needs to be less dumb. A grid that relies on the customer to notify the utility that the power is out, and that’s us people, is one severely in need of upgrading. With power and internet down, how well did your cell phone perform at the height of the storm? Not well, I suspect. With limited connectivity, how exactly are we all supposed to be in touch with Eversource to let them know we are cut off?
In a world where agreement on issues big and small is increasingly hard to come by, I am prepared to go out on a limb with the proposition that we all want our electricity on during storm events. Major investment in our electric delivery grid will be required to make this transformation. It is not just cable landings for offshore wind that will require new electricity infrastructure. Simple electric grid reliability necessitates new substations and enhanced transmission facilities, which include more buried lines. Of course these new facilities can and should be designed to minimize risk to the groundwater. In fact, many of the existing components of the energy delivery system are a greater daily risk to our water resources than the new stations that would support a more modern, reliable, and smarter grid.
How many more times will we collectively tolerate shivering in the dark before we get serious about building a more ecologically friendly and robust energy delivery system here on Cape Cod?
