The White House Says Extreme Weather Is Wrecking the Grid, and Climate Change Will Make It Worse

America's infrastructure is old and underfunded, and as it continues to crumble, it only gets more expensive. That's exemplified by our national electric grid, which is getting fragile as the years march on without a major overhaul. According to a new report from the White House, that fragility comes with the loss of tens of billions of dollars a year when bad weather knocks the power out.

Oh, and since we're talking weather, there's also the reality that climate change is expected to increase the prevalance of extreme weather events in the future, which means more money lost.

According to the report, there were "roughly 679 power outages, each affecting at least 50,000 customers" between 2003 and 2012. The vast majority (87 percent) of those major outages were caused by severe weather, and weather accounts for around 58 percent of all power outages nationwide.

The key finding is that outages as a whole are increasing, a trend driven by increasing weather-related outages. As highlighted by the graph above, major weather events—Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Sandy in 2012—have an outsized impact on infrastructure.

Indeed, fueled by increases in severe weather and the simple weakening of infrastructure with age, storms that cross the billion dollar threshold for destruction have increased in the last decade. In fact, seven of the 10 costliest storms in US history happened between 2004 and 2012.

While the cost of those storms involved more than just the costs of losing power—destruction of property and other infrastructure are obviously massive factors as well—the cost of power outages remains large. The White House report estimates the yearly cost of outages at an inflation-adjusted $18 billion to $33 billion, based on data from 2003 and 2012. A 2012 Congressional Research Service study puts the cost even higher: between $25 billion to $70 billion are lost annually to weather-related power outages.

And the problem is projected to get worse. Even as severe weather is expected to increase in frequency, the electric grid is getting older. We're coming off a historic low period of grid development. While that trend has begun to reverse—spurred in part by President Obama's first term emphasis on "shovel-ready" jobs and, as the report trumpets, a focus on renewing the grid—the power lines delivering our power now are older than ever.

What's the solution? The White House report naturally touts the $4.5 billion allocated to grid modernization in the 2009 Recovery Act. Curiously, it also spends a fair bit of time recommending developing the smart grid, which could help make reactions to outages more efficient and better informed, but which is perhaps less effective at mitigating storm-related outages than updating transmission lines. Regardless, our old grid is overdue for an overhaul.

@derektmead