Why are there still so many blackouts after major storms?

Millions of people were left in the dark after Hurricane Helene battered the southeastern U.S. last week; as of Friday morning, days after the storm abated, more than 700,000 were still without power.

The high costs of infrastructure improvements likely have contributed to the blackouts. Experts say more can be done to prevent power outages, but it would require significant investments.

“If you have a hurricane without significant flooding, but still very strong winds, if your lines are put underground, then it’s quite well protected against that,” said Ram Rajagopal, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford University.

“In those situations, the real question is the cost for undergrounding,” he said.

During hurricanes and other major storms, power lines are frequently taken down by trees, wind and debris — leaving residents, as well as businesses, schools and important community infrastructure, without power.

Meanwhile, climate change is making extreme weather more severe, a trend that’s only expected to increase in the years ahead. 

Fortifying power lines or putting them underground can mitigate the damage such weather events inflict.

“In areas that are prone to storms, like, coastline, etc., you install poles that are just stronger,” said Santiago Grijalva, a professor at Georgia Tech’s school of electrical and computer engineering. 

“As we’re seeing more of these storms, more unpredictability of these, a consideration is, should we start hardening more infrastructure in general?” Grijalva said. 

But doing so comes with costs, which utility companies could pass onto consumers.

Rajagopal said that historically, “all the customers of the utility have to pay for the undergrounding of any one cable.” 

“It’s rate based over 30 years and added to the cost into your bill,” he said. 

From the perspective of utilities, investing in resilience is about making choices that minimize risk while keeping costs down, said Scott Aaronson, senior vice president of security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, a lobby group representing electricity providers.

“The way I think about resilience is, yes, you make investments to prepare for and protect against hazards in a risk based, prioritized, cost effective way, and you acknowledge that you cannot protect everything from everything all of the time and still keep electricity affordable for customers,” Aaronson said. 

The price of resilience measures can be staggering.

Rajagopal said that in California, where he lives, the cost of putting some of the power lines underground could lead to a 20 percent rise in electric bills.

“If I do 1,000 miles, that’s a few billion dollars that I have to distribute maybe over a period of 10 years and then I have to put interest on it,” he said. 

Aaronson pointed to Florida, where he said about $3 billion was spent on significant infrastructure improvements after multiple hurricanes hit in 2005. 

But, he said, those investments worked: It took Florida Power & Light 18 days to restore power after 2005’s Hurricane Wilma, while after 2017’s Hurricane Irma, it took 10 days to fully restore.

Asked why consumers, rather than shareholders, should have to pay for these improvements, Aaronson said they are the beneficiaries. 

“Customers are, like customers of any business … paying for a product,” he said. “It is our responsibility to provide that product with that regulatory oversight at a reasonable price.”

There are other potential solutions beyond improving power lines themselves. 

One way to prevent blackouts is for consumers to also have access to individual power sources, like gas-powered generators or solar panels with battery storage, at their homes.

In that case, “if the line goes out of service in distribution, you still have some type of support,” Grijalva said. 

While customers gaining access to these power sources largely occurs on an individual basis, Rajagopal said utility companies could work to make solar installations more systemic. 

“Either the utility itself can offer to install this in a household, or they can give substantial incentives, because instead of paying to put lines under the ground, you could pay people to put these technologies on their homes and businesses,” he said.  

The government also could have a role to play in improving resilience. Aaronson said investments made under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act are helping. 

“We’ve been working very closely with the grid deployment office and with the Department of Energy to leverage the billions of dollars … that are being made available … many of which are prioritizing resilience,” he said. 

Asked what government can do to help, Grijalva called for a “vision” of what the grid should look like in the years ahead and said policies to implement it could follow. 

“What seems to be lacking a little bit is vision of how reliable the new grid needs to be, how distributed it needs to it needs to be, and what type of … technologies will be needed,” he said. 

He called for “new business models, new structures that allow the utility to get cost recovery, but at the same time, allows this movement towards [a] more decentralized type of architecture that is much more resilient.”