When frigid weather caused power outages across North Carolina on Christmas Eve, Eliana and David Mundula quickly became concerned about their 2½-week-old daughter, whom they had brought home from a neonatal intensive care unit days earlier.
“The temperature dropped in the house,” says Ms. Mundula, who lives in Matthews, south of Charlotte. “I got angry.”
But her husband pulled out a small gasoline generator a neighbor had persuaded them to buy a few years earlier, which allowed them to use a portable heater and restart their refrigerator, keeping them through much of the five-hour outage.
North of Charlotte, in the town of Cornelius, Gladys Henderson, an 80-year-old former cafeteria worker, was less fortunate. She didn’t have a generator and resorted to candles, a flashlight and an old kerosene heater to get through another recent outage.
“I almost always lose power,” said Ms. Henderson. “Sometimes it goes off and just stays off.”
Ms. Henderson is on the losing side of a new energy gap that leaves millions of people dangerously exposed to heat and cold.
As climate change increases the severity of heat waves, cold spells and other extreme weather, blackouts are becoming more common. In the 11 years to 2021, there were 986 weather-related power outages in the United States, nearly twice as many as in the previous 11 years, according to government data analyzed by Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists. The average customer of a U.S. electric utility will be without power for nearly eight hours in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration, more than twice as long as in 2013, the first year for which that data is available.
Outages are so common that generators and other backup power devices are considered essential by some. But many people like Mrs. Henderson can’t afford generators or the fuel they run. Even after strong sales in recent years, Generac, the leading seller of home generators, estimates that less than 6 percent of U.S. homes have a standby generator.
Energy experts warn that power outages will become more common due to extreme weather events linked to climate change. And those blackouts will hurt more people as Americans buy electric heat pumps and battery-powered cars to replace furnaces and vehicles that burn fossil fuels — a shift essential to mitigating climate change.
“The networks will be more vulnerable,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California and an expert in disaster management. “That promotes the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
The elderly, the frail, and those living in homes that are not properly protected or insulated are the most vulnerable, along with those who rely on electrically powered medical equipment or use medications that require refrigeration.
Power outages make heat, already a leading cause of preventable deaths, even more of a threat, said Brian Stone Jr., a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He conducted research to estimate how many people in Atlanta, Detroit and Phoenix would be exposed to extreme temperatures during power outages.
“A simultaneous event where you have an extended blackout during a heat wave is the deadliest form of climate threat we can imagine,” he said, noting that the cooling centers in those cities could only house a fraction of the people . greatest risk.
Ashley Ward, a senior policy fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, has studied how heat affects communities in North Carolina. Her research indicates that high temperatures cause more preterm births. She said even healthy people who work in high temperatures often suffer from heat-related illnesses, especially if they can’t cool their homes at night. “A power failure,” she said, “is a catastrophic event in many cases.”
North Carolina’s most recent power crisis, which occurred on Christmas Eve, occurred when temperatures dipped to 9 degrees Fahrenheit in the Charlotte area.
The state’s main utility, Duke Energy, began cutting power to customers to keep the power grid running after power plants went down and customers cranked up the heating in their homes. About 500,000 homes, or 15 percent of the company’s customers, were left without power in North and South Carolina, the first time the utility had taken advantage of continuous blackouts in the Carolinas.
The Mundulas had experienced other weather-related power outages since moving into their suburban home. After renting generators during previous outages, the couple spent $650 in August 2020 to buy one to power parts of their four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom home. A chorus of engines typically fills their neighborhood when the power goes out. “It’s just the hum of the generators,” Ms. Mundula said, adding that she never heard generators in the lower-income neighborhood of Greensboro, where she grew up.
The pair have considered larger systems, such as battery-powered solar, but those options would cost a lot.
Mrs. Henderson, the retired cafeteria worker, lives alone in her three-bedroom house. She relies on family, friends, and community groups to help her maintain the house, which gets its electricity from a community-owned utility. Frequent power outages are one of many problems in her historically African-American neighborhood, which also regularly floods.
Developers have offered to buy her house, but Ms. Henderson wants to stay there, as she has lived there for 50 years.
“My problem is actually the electrical problem,” Ms. Henderson said. “It’s very scary.”
Duke said it was aware of the risks faced by people like Ms Henderson. The company is tracking recurring outages in vulnerable communities to determine whether it should bury power lines to reduce the likelihood of power outages. The company also develops and tests strategies to relieve pressure on the power grid when energy demand exceeds supply. Those approaches include having electric cars sent to the grid and installing smart devices that can turn off appliances, reducing energy use.
“So if an extreme weather happens, we have a grid that can withstand it or recover quickly,” said Lon Huber, a senior vice president for customer solutions at Duke Energy.
Other threats to the network are more difficult to protect.
In early December, someone shot and damaged two Duke substations in Carthage, about 90 miles east of Charlotte, cutting power to thousands of homes for several days. Emergency services were receiving frantic calls from people whose oxygen equipment stopped working, forcing someone to visit homes and install pressure vessels that didn’t need power, said the city’s fire chief Brian Tyner.
The chief’s home also has no backup power, and he estimates that two-thirds of homes in the area do not have generators. “We could never justify the price,” he said.
Backup power systems can be as small as portable gasoline generators that can cost $500 or less. Often found on construction sites and campgrounds, these devices can only power a few devices at a time. Whole-house systems fueled with propane, natural gas, or diesel can provide power for days as long as fuel is available, but these generators start at around $10,000, including installation, and can cost much more for larger homes.
Solar panels combined with batteries can provide emission-free power, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars and usually can’t provide enough to run large appliances and heat pumps for more than a few hours. Those systems are also less reliable during cloudy, rainy or snowy days when there is not enough sunlight to fully charge the batteries.
Some homeowners eager to reduce their carbon emissions, lower their electricity bills and gain independence from the grid have combined several energy systems, often at significant cost.
Annie Dudley, a statistician from Chapel Hill, NC, lowered her energy consumption a few years ago. She installed a geothermal system, which uses the constant temperature of the earth to heat and cool her house, replacing an outdated system that came with the house. She later added 35 solar panels on her roof and two Tesla home batteries, which can provide enough power to meet most of her needs, including charging an electric Volkswagen Golf.
“The neighborhood has lost a lot of power, but I haven’t,” Ms Dudley said.
She spent about $52,000 on her solar panels and batteries, but $21,600 of that cost was paid for through rebates and tax credits. Ms. Dudley estimates that her utility bills are about $2,300 a year lower because of that investment and her geothermal system.
Generator companies believe that increasing electricity consumption and the threat of outages will keep demand for their products high.
Last year, Generac had $2.8 billion in U.S. homeowner sales, up 250 percent from 2017. In recent years, many people bought generators to make sure power outages wouldn’t interrupt their ability to work from home, says Aaron Jagdfeld, the CEO of Generac, which is based in Waukesha, Wis. Many people also bought generators because of severe weather, including an extreme heat wave in 2021 in the Pacific Northwest, and winter storm Uri, which caused blackouts for days in Texas and killed an estimated 246 people.
“People are thinking about this,” said Mr Jagdfeld, “in the context of the wider changes in climate and how that can affect not only the reliability of power, but also the things they need that power provides .”
