It is not just people who struggle to perform effectively when the temperature starts to soar. The electricity system we depend on to keep us cool is having the same problem.
A swarm of jellyfish linked to unusually warm waters in northern Europe caused French utility Electricite de France to shut two nuclear power stations last week, after the invertebrates clogged up parts of their cooling systems. Other reactors in the country might have to cut output because temperatures in the Rhone and Garonne rivers are too high.
In Iraq, supply to most of the country went down on Monday last week as millions of Shiite pilgrims descended on Karbala for Arba’in, spiking grid demand for fans and air-conditioners as the mercury rose above 40°C.
Illustration: Yusha
Even backup equipment struggles in such conditions: With the heat rising into the 30s, electricity went out and play was suspended at the Cincinnati Open tennis tournament on Tuesday last week, after an on-site generator apparently overheated.
Power that goes out when it is most needed should infuriate and frustrate but not surprise us. Most infrastructure was designed to perform within specific temperature ranges that the global climate is rapidly leaving behind. More of it is likely to start breaking as heat waves become more intense and widespread.
That is particularly the case with thermal generators — those that use the heat from burning fuels or atomic decay to spin turbines and induce electrical charges. Such plants have to find a way to dump excess heat, but that gets harder as the air and water outside warm up. The result is decreasing efficiency and overheating, forcing the plants to burn more fuel for the same output, or even halt operations altogether.
The effects can be significant. The probability that a coal generator would have a forced outage goes up by 3.2 percentage points during heat waves, while gas and nuclear are respectively 1.3 and 1 percentage points more likely to suffer an unplanned failure, a study by researchers in Sweden and Italy showed.
Separately, Iraqi researchers found that a gas plant lost about 21 percent of its generation potential as the temperature rose from 25°C to 50°C.
Drought, which commonly occurs alongside heat waves, makes the problem worse. Most thermal generators cool themselves by heating up water, whether it is in the sea, rivers or cooling towers. Cool water, like cool air, gets less abundant as the temperature rises.
India has lost 19 days’ worth of coal electricity since 2014 because water shortages have forced shutdowns, Reuters reported. In many areas, residents depend on tanker trucks and ever-deeper boreholes because generators are using up all of the surface water. Power stations might put more pressure on water supplies between now and 2050 than the drinking water needs of its population, government forecasts showed.
Conventional generators are not the only ones to suffer. As anyone who has sat through a still, sticky summer day would recognize, wind speeds often plummet in hot weather. Since the early 1980s, the area of the globe affected by such conditions has increased by 6.3 percent every decade, to the point that about 60 percent of the planet is at risk.
In Australia, Siberia and Europe, the availability of wind can decline by 30 to 50 percent during heat waves relative to what it would be in normal years — although a few areas, such as the northern US, east Africa, the Amazon and western China, experience the opposite effect.
Even if we can solve the problem of generating energy, getting it to consumers presents challenges. Transmission cables and transformers heat up as electrons travel through their wires, and rising air temperatures make such components more susceptible to failure — especially as they are typically working harder on such days due to all the air-conditioners and fans running.
It is not just people who need relief from the heat. About one-third of electricity consumption from data centers comes from heating and cooling to maintain stable temperatures on-site. That demand rises along with the mercury, and is becoming more pressing with the spread of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies.
A heat wave in 2022 caused chaos at two London hospitals when their server racks shut down, scrambling the information technology systems they depend on to process medical data.
The rising dominance of solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, which tend to be more resilient than thermal generators and wind during heat waves, offer some respite. It still might not be enough. Most of industrial civilization, built from the energy riches unleashed by coal, oil and gas, depends on a moderate climate that their carbon emissions are throwing into disorder. The damage caused by fossil technology is going to be with us long after we have switched to cleaner ways of generating power.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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