C37546-DAY5-Texas blackouts raise climate warning

Since decades ago, energy regulators and climate scientists had warned the state’s electric-grid operators  that they couldn’t prepare for unusual weather events, So the extreme winter weather that hit Texas in mid-February did not come as a surprise.

Several factors seem at play in a spike in Texas blackouts. To begin with, much of the electricity infrastructure in Texas wasn’t hardened. Besides, Several power plants remained offline for scheduled maintenance, ignoring weather forecasters’ warnings of the fast-approaching storm.

A growing body of research links climate change with the occurrence of the so-called polar vortex.These climate-linked disasters, and their fallout, create an existential threat for many communities that are most exposed to the effects of the changing climate as global warming intensifies.

From the standpoint of experts who study climate adaptation communities should invest fully in measures that have proved to work, from hardening infrastructure to developing more localized energy production. What’s more,planners need to integrate technologies like energy storage.