The disaster no major U.S. city is prepared for

Heat and extended power outages are killers. See this Washington Post story, The disaster no major U.S. city is prepared for

 The article looks at the impacts from Tropical Storm Beryl that hit the Houston Metro area, that also intersected with a heat wave that coincided with a large-scale power outage. It was not the hottest of hot, but the combination of the heat and lack of power are what took its toll on people.

 Like always, those folks who don’t have many financial resources to begin with, suffer the most and are not able to easily mitigate the situation they find themselves in.

 While this event had a storm as the instigator, I still think that our aging electrical grid will collapse at some point during an extreme heat event. If the outage persists along with high temperatures, we’ll see many hundreds of deaths as people can’t cope with the extended impacts of heat on our body’s functioning.  I’m guessing it is only a matter of time before such an event occurs.

 Collectively we have more and more demands being placed on the electrical grid as we move forward with a green economy. Then there is also the huge power requirements that are coming from companies implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions that demand much more power. We are digging ourselves into are really deep hole!