The record-breaking heatwave baking the Northwest US offers the latest example of how ill-prepared we are to deal with the deadly challenges of climate change.
The triple-digit temperatures in many areas have created soaring energy demands and strains on the grid, as residents crank up fans and air conditioners—in many cases newly acquired units in places that have rarely required them in the past. At least thousands of homes lost power around Portland, Seattle and elsewhere in the last few days, creating potentially dangerous situations amid temperatures that can easily trigger heat stroke or worse.
Observers are worried there could be more widespread outages as temperatures climb higher this week and the heatwave reaches other regions.
Climate change is driving increasingly frequent, extreme, and extended heatwaves around the globe, climate scientists consistently find. In this case, a high-pressure ridge parked along the Canadian border created what’s known as a heat dome, trapping hot air over an area stretching down to Northern California and as far east as Idaho.
California grid operators announced they’d likely call for voluntary reductions in electricity use on Monday, amid projected shortfalls in supply as temperatures threaten to reach the mid-100s in the inland part of the state.
While the main concern is the surge in demand that occurs as residents dial up air conditioning, heat itself can undermine the grid in other ways as well, says Arne Olson, senior partner at consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics Inc. Among other problems, it can reduce the efficiency of power plants, overheat transformers and cause power lines to sag, which can brush against trees and cause outages.
California faces the additional challenge of having less hydroelectric power available than normal, amid extreme drought conditions. In addition, the operators of the west’s interconnected grids may not be able to count on much excess supply from other areas because the heatwave is affecting such a large swath of the country, Olson adds.
In many ways, what we’re witnessing is an electricity system largely built for the climate of the past increasingly struggle with the climate of the present, says Jane Long, a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Bolstering our electricity systems for increasingly frequent or severe forms of extreme weather—whether this summer’s heatwaves or last winter’s storms—will necessitate major upgrades of US grids, including: moving to modern transmission and distribution systems; “weatherizing” generation sources like wind turbines or natural-gas plants; and adding far more energy storage.
It will also require developing a diverse array of power plants that can provide a steady supply in any weather scenario or time of day, Long says. That will become tricker as regions come to rely on ever larger shares of wind and solar power, which continually fluctuate. Studies by Long and others have found states will need to incorporate additional carbon-free sources that can provide on-demand output, such as geothermal, nuclear, hydrogen or natural gas plants with systems that can capture climate emissions.
We’ll also need increasingly efficient and climate-friendly forms of air conditioning systems.
Soaring temperatures and severe drought conditions also increase fire risks, which call for additional electricity system changes and considerations, including: burying lines, installing modern ones that shut off when a break is detected, and building distributed electricity generation and storage systems.
Power outages aren’t merely an inconvenience during heatwaves, they can quickly become deadly, as heat exhaustion turns into heat stroke, says Stacey Champion, a community advocate who has tracked indoor heat deaths in Arizona and pushed the local utility to suspend power shutoffs during high temperature periods. “It’s known as the silent killer,” Champion says.
Indeed, heatwaves kill more Americans than hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes combined. Children, the elderly, and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable.
Studies find that the deaths and illnesses from soaring temperatures will only rise as climate change accelerates.
What are chemical pollutants doing to our bodies? It’s a timely question given that last week, people in Philadelphia cleared grocery shelves of bottled water after a toxic leak from a chemical plant spilled into a tributary of the Delaware River, a source of drinking water for 14 million people. And it was only last month that a train carrying a suite of other hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, unleashing an unknown quantity of toxic chemicals.
There’s no doubt that we are polluting the planet. In order to find out how these pollutants might be affecting our own bodies, we need to work out how we are exposed to them. Which chemicals are we inhaling, eating, and digesting? And how much? The field of exposomics, which seeks to study our exposure to pollutants, among other factors, could help to give us some much-needed answers.Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This story is from The Checkup, Jessica’s weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
Read more:
+ The toxic chemicals all around us. Meet Nicolette Bugher, a researcher working to expose the poisons lurking in our environment and discover what they mean for human health. Read the full story.
+ Building a better chemical factory—out of microbes. Professor Kristala Jones Prather is helping to turn microbes into efficient producers of desired chemicals. Read the full story.
+ Microplastics are messing with the microbiomes of seabirds. The next step is to work out what this might mean for their health—and ours. Read the full story.
People are gathering in virtual spaces to relax, and even sleep, with their headsets on. VR sleep rooms are becoming popular among people who suffer from insomnia or loneliness, offering cozy enclaves where strangers can safely find relaxation and company—most of the time.
Each VR sleep room is created to induce calm. Some imitate beaches and campsites with bonfires, while others re-create hotel rooms or cabins. Soundtracks vary from relaxing beats to nature sounds to absolute silence, while lighting can range from neon disco balls to pitch-black darkness.
The opportunity to sleep in groups can be particularly appealing to isolated or lonely people who want to feel less alone, and safe enough to fall asleep. The trouble is, what if the experience doesn’t make you feel that way? Read the full story.
—Tanya Basu
Inside the conference where researchers are solving the clean-energy puzzle
There are plenty of tried-and-true solutions that can begin to address climate change right now: wind and solar power are being deployed at massive scales, electric vehicles are coming to the mainstream, and new technologies are helping companies make even fossil-fuel production less polluting.
But as we knock out the easy climate wins, we’ll also need to get creative to tackle harder-to-solve sectors and reach net-zero emissions.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) funds high-risk, high-reward energy research projects, and each year the agency hosts a summit where funding recipients and other researchers and companies in energy can gather to talk about what’s new in the field.
As I listened to presentations, met with researchers, and—especially—wandered around the showcase, I often had a vague feeling of whiplash. Standing at one booth trying to wrap my head around how we might measure carbon stored by plants, I would look over and see another group focused on making nuclear fusion a more practical way to power the world.
There are plenty of tried-and-true solutions that can begin to address climate change right now: wind and solar power are being deployed at massive scales, electric vehicles are coming to the mainstream, and new technologies are helping companies make even fossil-fuel production less polluting. But as we knock out the easy wins, we’ll also need to get creative to tackle harder-to-solve sectors and reach net-zero emissions. Here are a few intriguing projects from the ARPA-E showcase that caught my eye.
Vaporized rocks
“I heard you have rocks here!” I exclaimed as I approached the Quaise Energy station.
Quaise’s booth featured a screen flashing through some fast facts and demonstration videos. And sure enough, laid out on the table were two slabs of rock. They looked a bit worse for wear, each sporting a hole about the size of a quarter in the middle, singed around the edges.
These rocks earned their scorch marks in service of a big goal: making geothermal power possible anywhere. Today, the high temperatures needed to generate electricity using heat from the Earth are only accessible close to the surface in certain places on the planet, like Iceland or the western US.
Geothermal power could in theory be deployed anywhere, if we could drill deep enough. Getting there won’t be easy, though, and could require drilling 20 kilometers (12 miles) beneath the surface. That’s deeper than any oil and gas drilling done today.
Rather than grinding through layers of granite with conventional drilling technology, Quaise plans to get through the more obstinate parts of the Earth’s crust by using high-powered millimeter waves to vaporize rock. (It’s sort of like lasers, but not quite.)
