During winter storms, our fragile utility grid is often tested, but long-term fixes aren't made. It's a costly mistake. Photo: Shutterstock
On a frosty morning last December, thousands of Rhode Island residents woke up to an increasingly familiar aggravation. Another strong storm had ripped across the state overnight, toppling trees and powerlines like toothpicks. The power was out – again.
Like New England as a whole, Rhode Island is experiencing more tornadoes, tropical storms, flash floods, and heat waves, resulting in more-frequent power outages. Supercharged storms are rampaging through towns and cities like a bull liberated from a pen, crashing through a fragile utility infrastructure that, in many cases, has not changed in a century. And so, every year, utility companies submit to the onslaught of storms, repair the damage, then obediently wait for more and do it all over again.
You don’t have to be an expert to see the problem with this shortsighted approach.
“Storms are getting much more destructive, and the costs are becoming astronomical,” says Johanna Epke, CLF staff attorney specializing in environmental justice and climate resilience. “A storm might cause $300 million worth of damage instead of the $50 million it used to. The stratospheric costs are becoming hard to ignore.”
And who’s on the hook for those skyrocketing costs? You guessed it – you and me. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Rinse and Repeat
New England’s utility companies are stuck in a rinse-and-repeat cycle. They could and should be fortifying their infrastructure against climate change, especially since the fallout from our overheating planet will only get more severe. Instead, these companies operate with a business-as-usual mindset, typically contributing to a state “storm fund” from which they can draw after disaster strikes.
But, with climate change, extreme weather is coming so fast and furiously that storm funds are now running dry. (In Rhode Island, for example, the state storm fund is now more than $70 million in the red.) So, these days, utility companies pay for repairs on their own and then tack the extra costs onto customers’ bills. Because those costs have become so high, companies are forced to spread them out, amortizing expenses years into the future. And customers are paying the costs of the utility companies’ poor planning – along with interest. In 2023, the Massachusetts electrical utility Eversource asked for $338 million from customers to cover repairs from three storms in 2021 and 2022 – $86.4 million of which was interest charged to customers. In Maine, Central Maine Power budgeted $10 million for storm response in 2022, but the actual cost of repairs was $127 million. And yes, it turned to customers to pay the difference until Maine officials negotiated a settlement making shareholders pay some of the costs.
“People are starting to realize this system is failing and unsustainable,” says Epke. “And they’re looking for alternatives. We have an opportunity to prepare the system and to keep costs down by making upfront investments now.”
A Better Idea? Proactive Planning
There’s the saying, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” That saying could apply to utility companies and state regulators who appear content to weather increasingly violent storms with inadequate preparation. Consequently, customers pay more and suffer the sometimes-dire consequences.
“When the power goes out, people are exposed to dangerous temperatures because they lose heating and air conditioning,” says Epke. “Food and medicines can spoil. In extended power outages, people can die of hypothermia or heatstroke.”
A wiser response, Epke says, is to make long-term, permanent upgrades to our region’s utility infrastructure so it sustains less damage and fewer disruptions in the first place.
What does proactive planning look like? Epke says it might mean elevating or relocating infrastructure. Wooden electrical poles might be exchanged for more storm-resistant steel poles or underground wires. Microgrids connecting neighborhoods to solar power sources could help solve power outages. Companies can prune trees so that tree canopy can flourish while reducing the likelihood that fallen trees will snap transmission lines.
New England states could follow the lead of places like New York City, which began seriously fortifying infrastructure following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. That storm knocked out power to two million customers for days. Today, New York’s energy resilience plan includes reinforcing electrical substations against flooding, elevating control cabinets in pumphouses and cooling plants, and upgrading and replacing transformers. New York has also considered ideas like moving overhead powerlines underground.
Stop Repeating Mistakes
Unfortunately, in New England we have not been so proactive. We continue our Sisyphean effort of rolling the repair boulder up the hill of climate change, only to watch it tumble back down. That’s an expensive and dangerous way of doing business for utility customers who depend on reliable and affordable power for their health and safety, says Epke.
To turn this around, CLF is working across the region to prod states into more comprehensive strategies for fortifying our utilities against increasingly extreme weather. We have pushed the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities to require utilities in that state to assess their vulnerability to climate change and create a real plan to adapt to climate change beyond their routine budgeted “emergency repairs.” We’re asking for the same in Rhode Island and working with our partners to develop community microgrids. And in Maine we are working with partners and state regulators to figure out how to keep storm recovery costs from escalating.
When it comes to our utilities preparing for climate change, we cannot allow them to continue the unsustainable cycle they have trapped us in. Communities deserve better.
“The opportunity to get creative about making the system more resilient to extreme weather is now – because the cost of doing nothing has become undeniable,” says Epke.
