"What happens is that some people tend to think, well, that last storm that we just had, that'll be the worst, right?" Hill says. But upgrading the way humans assess risk, she says, is harder.
#S and s electric software#
Hill noted that Con Edison, the utility company providing New York City with energy, responded with upgrades to its grid: It buried power lines, introduced artificial intelligence, upgraded software to detect failures. The city that never sleeps plunged into darkness." It overcame the barriers at the tip of Manhattan, and then the electric grid - a substation blew out. "That storm surge came in close to 14 feet. "They thought the maximum would be 12 feet," she says.
"It's a little like we're building the plane as we're flying because the climate is changing right now, and it's picking up speed as it changes," Hill says. She says past weather extremes can no longer safely guide future electricity planning. She served on the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration, where she led the effort to develop climate resilience. Hill is an energy and environment expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It looked to the extremes of the past - how high the seas got, how high the winds got, the heat." "Everything that we've built, including the electric grid, assumed a stable climate," she says. It faces a future with more people - people who drive more electric cars and heat homes with more electric furnaces.Īlice Hill says that's not even the biggest problem the country's electricity infrastructure faces. is aging and already struggling to meet current demand. The Baltimore Gas and Electric Fitzell substation in Edgemere, Md., is about a year old and was built so that it can eventually be modified to provide more capacity.
0 kommentar(er)
