New York City's Power Is Going Down Amid Brutal Heatwave
While a gigantic heat dome parks itself like an unwelcome guest over a major swath of the United States, residents of the ultra-dense metropolis of New York City are the perfect example of a country so cooked by climate change that it's overwhelming existing infrastructure.
More than 3,000 people were without power for a second day in a row in parts of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, according to local broadcaster PIX 11. Con Edison, the local power company, did manage to restore power to over 34,000 households in the Bronx.
It's an alarming example of power grid failures across the nation and world amidst this annual onslaught of intense heat. Utilities in North Carolina are urging residents to conserve electricity in case the power grid goes down, while their counterparts in Maine are also afraid of peak electricity tripping up their operations.
The unrelenting temperatures, which has soared over three digits and is considered the first heat wave of the season, should peak midweek for Northeastern cities.
"Like an air fryer, it's going to be hot," Ryan Maue, meteorologist and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist, told NPR. "This is a three-day stretch of dangerous heat that will test the mettle of city dwellers who are most vulnerable to oppressive heat waves."
Inevitably it'll cool down, but the threat of blackouts as global warming makes our weather more extreme is dire no matter where you look.
Much of the power grid in the United States was built decades ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, and transmission infrastructure has a shelf-life of 50 to 80 years, with billions needed to pay for their upgrades.
There has been research to make the power grid more resilient, but something tells us that not much has been deployed; the Department of Energy just issued a warning about electricity usage in the Southeast of the United States.
Oh, and not only are we facing the double whammy of aging infrastructure and climate change, but we also need to contend with power-hungry AI data centers.
Can we keep up? So far, the answer seems to be "barely."
More on power grids: Sam Altman Says "Significant Fraction" of Earth's Total Electricity Should Go to Running AI
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