Following a power outage during Hurricane Irma in 2017, I remember fumbling with my camping stove to cook instant oatmeal, squatting on the cold covered landing outside my apartment. The storm had already passed, but the disruption was just beginning. I fared comparatively well, losing power for roughly 24 hours (roughly 4 oatmeals, but who’s counting?) but the impact on the grid and community—with downed powerlines, short-term flooding, trees and debris impeding recovery efforts, and damaged traffic signals—lasted far longer.
A new report by UCS highlights the pattern of these challenges by exploring the intersection of extreme weather, power outages, and future grid resilience in the central United States. This report showed how extreme weather events were behind all high-impact power outages in the central United States between 2014 and 2024. Here, I’ll explore what we know about the intersection between extreme weather and climate change, and how attribution science can help decision-makers understand, plan for, and reduce future grid disruptions driven by human-caused climate change.
Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of many extreme events
Extreme weather events, like hurricanes, are some of the most noticeable impacts of climate change in everyday life, and their impact is growing. These mounting hazards translate directly into grid stress: heat degrades transmission efficiency, heavy rain floods power substations, and compound storms damage multiple parts of the system before repairs can be completed.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an authoritative body on the science of climate change (and one from which the US recently withdrew), synthesized research on extreme events in their most recent report cycle. The report highlights that heat extremes—like heatwaves that have been covered extensively across the United States, heavy precipitation, and drought—have increased in frequency and intensity globally. For tropical cyclones, the IPCC reports that the occurrence of high intensity storms (Category 3-5) has increased over the last four decades, but with lower confidence than extremes like heat.
One of the key findings of the new UCS report shows that compound events, where events occur simultaneously or one right after the other, amplify disruption and consequences from extreme events. One example from the report is the tornadoes and flooding that followed landfall of Hurricane Delta, impacting communities from Texas to the Carolinas. Similarly, Hurricane Zeta in late October 2020 followed a nearly identical path to that of Hurricane Delta, creating additional challenges or in some instance, reversing recovery efforts.
For power systems, compound events often turn what would be short outages into prolonged blackouts by disrupting access to damaged equipment and delaying restoration. Communities with older infrastructure and fewer backup resources are hit hardest extending outages and widening existing inequities. The IPCC explores the trends of these types of compound events as well, finding that a larger area of the world is now experiencing compound events, and that concurrent events are projected to increase with climate change, particularly if the increase global average surface temperature crosses 2°C. These patterns challenge long-standing grid planning assumptions based on historical climate conditions that increasingly underestimate future risks.
Attribution science quantifies the contribution of climate change to extreme events
Attribution science expands on observational research by identifying and quantifying the contribution of climate change to trends and specific events. Using climate models and simulating scenarios both with and without human influence, this type of research can lead to conclusions like climate change made extreme rainfall from Hurricane Harvey 15% more intense or temperatures in a North American heatwave in 2023 were 2°C (more than 3.5°F) hotter due to climate change.
Some types of events, however, are more well studied than others. While the formation of individual hurricanes are difficult to attribute to climate change, researchers in 2022 showed that climate change increased rainfall rates by 11% and rain accumulation by 8% for hurricane-strength storms during the North Atlantic 2020 hurricane season, including Hurricanes Delta and Zeta, which are featured in the latest UCS report’s top 10 outage events. For grid planners, attribution science provides evidence that recent outages are not isolated anomalies, but rather part of a climate-driven shift that must be incorporated into reliability standards, investment planning, and emergency preparedness.
On the other hand, thunderstorms—part of the broader class of what climate scientists call “severe convective storms”—are represented less frequently in attribution research, due to climate modeling constraints including the broad scale on which models operate. The IPCC noted in 2021 that in the United States, “there is no significant increase in convective storms, and hail and severe thunderstorms.” Research since that report, however, has demonstrated an intensification of straight-line winds over the last 40 years in the central United States. This study could lay the groundwork for a future attribution study, as these storms drive some of the most damaging outages across the central US.
Climate models project further increases in extreme events
While attribution explains how climate change has already influenced outages, projection studies show that these risks will continue to grow, making proactive grid adaptation unavoidable.
One of the key findings in the report is that the worst ten power outages in the region have occurred since 2020, highlighting the escalating impacts of climate change and the risks that continue to build from additional fossil fuel emissions (see the table below). These extreme events include four hurricanes, three derechos, two severe thunderstorms, and one severe winter storm. Attribution science is backward looking by design. However, other types of climate modeling and research have projected a continued increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events.
| Date | Event | Peak Daily Total Customers Out |
| June 11, 2020 | Derecho | 798,028 |
| August 11, 2020 | Derecho | 1,642,616 |
| August 27, 2020 | Hurricane Laura | 1,004,355 |
| October 10, 2020 | Hurricane Delta | 961,100 |
| October 29, 2020 | Hurricane Zeta | 841,296 |
| August 11, 2021 | Derecho | 1,306,710 |
| August 30, 2021 | Hurricane Ida | 1,351,381 |
| December 16, 2021 | Severe Thunderstorm | 963,218 |
| August 30, 2022 | Severe Thunderstorm | 840,130 |
| February 23, 2023 | Severe Winter Storm | 1,174,566 |
Dates, names, and peak daily outages for extreme events in the central United States from 2014-2024. Source: UCS, Power after the Storm
A 2023 study of the August 2020 derecho, included in the report, found that under high-emissions climate change scenarios, a similar storm could impact an area 50-100% larger than that of the August 2020 storm, which led to an estimate $1 billion in damages and resulted in outages for nearly 1.7 million people. The IPCC provides scientific insight on this as well, finding that the frequency of severe storms “is projected to increase in the USA, leading to a lengthening of the severe convective storm season.”
The IPCC also assessed research projecting hurricane frequency in a climate-changed future, noting that most, but not all “simulations project significant reductions in the total number of tropical cyclones,” however this remains an active area of research. The IPCC assessed research hurricanes in a climate-change future concluding that the proportion of higher intensity storms (Categories 4-5) will likely increase. Research published last year quantified this projected increase, showing a 62% increase in likelihood of Category 4 or above storms with 2°C of warming. Importantly, the impacts of these storms may also increase with projections of heavier rainfall and higher average peak wind speeds with warming.
Together, research shows that certain types of extreme events will grow more frequent and severe, underscoring the urgency of adapting our communities and grid to these projected changes.
Our choices now can determine how prepared communities will be for extreme weather
UCS’ new report makes clear that prioritizing a climate-resilient grid is a key component of adapting to climate change and some of its most extreme impacts. Building a climate-resilient grid requires more than stronger pylons and smarter planning: it requires strong science.
Much of what we know about the storms that knock out power, the compound events that delay recovery, and the ways climate change is reshaping risk comes from federally supported research institutions like the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and agencies like NOAA and NASA. The data and research from these institutions underpins weather forecasting, extreme precipitation analysis, hurricane intensity projections, air quality monitoring, and the modeling systems that make attribution science possible.
The choices being made now, by the Trump administration, regional decisionmakers, and local utilities, are those that will impact the grid’s reliability through the end of this, when the frequency and intensity of extreme events will have intensified further.