In August 2024, warnings were ample for U.S. electric utilities serving coastal areas: the federal government forecast a 90 percent chance of an above-average Atlantic hurricane season – an “extremely active” run that could rank among the busiest on record. Nature quickly served notice just weeks after that, with hurricanes Helene and Milton striking as a devastating one-two punch to the Southeast.
For U.S. power providers, there’s just no getting around the threats of weather and climate disasters. From 1980 to early September 2024, there’ve been 396 of them in which overall damages or costs have tallied at least $1 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The combined total: More than $2.78 trillion.
The increasing frequency has been astounding: from 2019 through 2023, billion-dollar disasters came an average of 16 days apart, compared to 82 days in the 1980s.
Traditionally stretching from June through November, hurricane seasons that include tropical storms make for anxiety at all times of the day for power providers and the countless homes and businesses that depend on them in vulnerable regions, given that hurricanes can make landfall at any moment. Increasingly, power providers outside of coastal areas also are experiencing significant climate-change-induced storms – and other fallout, including wildfires, droughts and landslides – that are significantly impacting their ability to provide power to their customers.
Efforts to mitigate it all applies to both bracing for such unpredictable, menacing forces of nature as well as dealing with the aftermath, the anxiety is justified. In July, Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to nearly 3 million people around Houston – the country’s fourth-biggest city – after becoming the earliest Category 5 hurricane observed in the Atlantic on record. In early August, Hurricane Debby left hundreds of thousands without electricity after making landfall in Florida, then slinking up the eastern seaboard wreaking havoc in her path. Hurricane Helene hit the coast in late September, followed less than two weeks later by Hurricane Milton, each leaving millions without power.
For utilities grappling with the decades-long challenge of aging infrastructure vulnerable to extreme weather, the pressure is mounting to invest in grid upgrades that enhance operational resiliency. To help restore the power more quickly, efficiently and sustainably when disasters strike, there’s also an imperative to marshal the resources – from boots and specialized trucks on the ground to drones in the sky – along with other technologies and essential replacement parts such as poles and transformers.
It’s about being both proactive and reactive, leveraging the expertise of a critical infrastructure solutions provider to formulate a multi-dimensional approach that ensures preparedness, responsiveness, recovery and a mitigation path forward.
Here’s what that path looks like.
Before the Storm
The destructive force of hurricanes is far from a mystery: of the 363 billion-dollar U.S. weather disasters from 1980 to August 2023, hurricanes have brought the most damage – more than $1.3 trillion, an average of $22.8 billion per event, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
That should be plenty of motivation for planning and preparedness by U.S. power utilities traditionally in harm’s way of hurricanes to get more resilient. But hardening infrastructure isn’t a simple proposition for utilities that face significant headwinds, from the chronically aging infrastructure to the growing need to integrate cleaner, greener sources of intermittent renewable energy onto the grid, all while maintaining robust, yearlong vegetation management programs that protect above-ground power lines. It’s a challenging backdrop compounded by a shortage of skilled labor with adequate training to work in high-voltage environments
As a consultancy and resiliency expert in the power sector, Black & Veatch has worked for more than a century with many of the nation’s top power providers. In these times, we’ve seen that many of them take emergency preparedness very seriously, often regularly doing exercises to simulate their reactions to hypothetical storm scenarios.
Yet Black & Veatch’s newly released 2024 Electric Report – based on a survey of more than 700 U.S. electric sector stakeholders – shows holistic storm readiness to be a work in progress. One-quarter of respondents don’t do climate-related disaster scenario planning to prepare for potential disruptive weather events such as hurricanes, while nearly one in four don’t explicitly factor climate risk into their planning. That said, power providers should consider enlisting experts in climate risk modeling with predictive analytics that can reveal when existing infrastructure and physical assets may be at risk in the near and long term – and help inform what, where and when to prioritize climate risk mitigation measures.
In the meantime, utilities should review and update their emergency response plan to ensure strong collaboration with federal, state and local emergency management agencies, while also ensuring their plans outline their personnel and resource management processes. They should conduct exercises and role play hypothetical storm scenarios, ferreting out any response gaps. They should stay on top of the weather reports, heeding any shifts in an approaching storm’s track to position recovery assets at staging areas ahead of landfall. They should engage local, regional and statewide first responders to ensure everyone is following the same playbook. If possible, they should maintain stockpiles of resources such as transformers, poles and other essential repair supplies. And they should ensure they have the tools in place to communicate the status of their systems effectively during a crisis.
After the Storm
As much as powerful storms throw at a vulnerable grid, power utilities can and should respond in kind with everything at their disposal to mitigate and resolve the fallout. That starts with thoughtful, technology-driven management of resources, information and personnel under a multi-pronged approach involving digital and physical innovations.
Black & Veatch – and its Bird Electric subsidiary, specializing in storm restoration after extreme weather events – has been a leader in disaster response solutions, from guiding the proactive path toward readiness to being on the front lines of the life-sustaining pushes to get the power back on.
Think of it as a full suite of services, steeped in integrated innovations involving such things as digital mapping, resource and incident management software, state-of-the-art mobile field command posts and pop-up “base camps.”
Mapping intelligence. With advanced analytics capabilities using geospatial technology, this solution offered by Black & Veatch might be best thought of as a digital chessboard, using geographic information system (GIS) to show the outage locations and the positionings of key storm response, recovery personnel and assets in the field – and how they’re all being put to use.
Black & Veatch is developing advanced mapping using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to predict where outages may occur, enabling the pre-positioning of assets so that the response can be quicker and smarter. As a global leader in critical infrastructure solutions and resilience, we are building out an advanced mapping damage assessment using lasers (LIDAR) and 3-D imaging, giving utilities an automated, digital look at what’s been damaged and in need of repair.
Software solutions can manage restoration and recovery resources effectively day to day, including personnel and equipment tracking and how resources in the field are being moved in real time, while also providing for overall incident management support that allows us to enhance communication with our client so they can make better decisions about their response priorities Call it digital transformation in the innovation space that is aimed at increasing efficiency which saves time and money, but also helps stabilize the situation quicker for the client and community through our custom software management tool.
Mobile command centers. Whether in the form of a truck or trailer, mobile and modular solutions where key decision-makers can be assembled out of the elements after an extreme weather event are game changers in restoring power – and order. Advanced by Black & Veatch, these climate-controlled assets often are state-of-the-art, with satellite communications, 5G networks, printers and computers for advanced on-site analytics. All vital in giving decision-makers the needed situational awareness – much like a war room – complemented by digital connectivity.
Base camps
As a grouping of mobile command centers, these assets prove their worth as the place where all storm-response operations are managed.
In the end, readiness – from prepositioning assets to scenario playing and having relevant personnel and technologies on hand – holds much of the key in ensuring how ultimately the storm response unfolds.
While no storm is alike, utilities should make being proactive a priority in setting up the reaction, understanding that significant missteps can fuel public and political pressure along with serious, sometimes preventable scrutiny and scorn.
Hurricane Beryl: A Black & Veatch Case Study
After Hurricane Beryl pummeled the Houston area in July 2024, plunging more than 2 million residents into darkness, responding Bird Electric accounted for one-fourth of those in the field, with approximately 2,000 pieces of equipment at five staging areas – each using the mobile command centers – and four damage assessment areas to help bring back the power.
While Bird’s response was multifaceted; efforts were made to use new innovative solutions during their response. Bird initiated their response by using the advanced mapping solution innovation to locate and initiate contact with subcontractors. A helmet-mounted digital asset-tracking camera was tested, digitally recording miles of power lines. Because damage assessment is an intensely manual process of driving and walking neighborhoods to pinpoint damaged circuits, there’s great promise in deploying such on-the-ground innovation that have the ability to bolster the speed, efficiency and accuracy of the process.
Invariably, power restoration efforts during and after a disaster is a challenging planning and operational endeavor for utilities; Bird’s technology and infrastructure helped lessened that burden, given that the utility didn’t have to worry about how Bird was managing its assets.
All the while, Bird contractors and staff interacted with the public onsite, using their training to help quell the frustrations of those without power.
In the end, Bird’s staging areas and personnel accounted for more than 500,000 hours of work, with Bird managing all personnel, equipment and staging areas with roughly 10 site management personnel.
Before the Storm
The destructive force of hurricanes is far from a mystery: of the 363 billion-dollar U.S. weather disasters from 1980 to August 2023, hurricanes have brought the most damage – more than $1.3 trillion, an average of $22.8 billion per event, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
That should be plenty of motivation for planning and preparedness by U.S. power utilities traditionally in harm’s way of hurricanes to get more resilient. But hardening infrastructure isn’t a simple proposition for utilities that face significant headwinds, from the chronically aging infrastructure to the growing need to integrate cleaner, greener sources of intermittent renewable energy onto the grid, all while maintaining robust, yearlong vegetation management programs that protect above-ground power lines. It’s a challenging backdrop compounded by a shortage of skilled labor with adequate training to work in high-voltage environments
As a consultancy and resiliency expert in the power sector, Black & Veatch has worked for more than a century with many of the nation’s top power providers. In these times, we’ve seen that many of them take emergency preparedness very seriously, often regularly doing exercises to simulate their reactions to hypothetical storm scenarios.
Yet Black & Veatch’s newly released 2024 Electric Report – based on a survey of more than 700 U.S. electric sector stakeholders – shows holistic storm readiness to be a work in progress. One-quarter of respondents don’t do climate-related disaster scenario planning to prepare for potential disruptive weather events such as hurricanes, while nearly one in four don’t explicitly factor climate risk into their planning. That said, power providers should consider enlisting experts in climate risk modeling with predictive analytics that can reveal when existing infrastructure and physical assets may be at risk in the near and long term – and help inform what, where and when to prioritize climate risk mitigation measures.
In the meantime, utilities should review and update their emergency response plan to ensure strong collaboration with federal, state and local emergency management agencies, while also ensuring their plans outline their personnel and resource management processes. They should conduct exercises and role play hypothetical storm scenarios, ferreting out any response gaps. They should stay on top of the weather reports, heeding any shifts in an approaching storm’s track to position recovery assets at staging areas ahead of landfall. They should engage local, regional and statewide first responders to ensure everyone is following the same playbook. If possible, they should maintain stockpiles of resources such as transformers, poles and other essential repair supplies. And they should ensure they have the tools in place to communicate the status of their systems effectively during a crisis.
After the Storm
As much as powerful storms throw at a vulnerable grid, power utilities can and should respond in kind with everything at their disposal to mitigate and resolve the fallout. That starts with thoughtful, technology-driven management of resources, information and personnel under a multi-pronged approach involving digital and physical innovations.
Black & Veatch – and its Bird Electric subsidiary, specializing in storm restoration after extreme weather events – has been a leader in disaster response solutions, from guiding the proactive path toward readiness to being on the front lines of the life-sustaining pushes to get the power back on.
Think of it as a full suite of services, steeped in integrated innovations involving such things as digital mapping, resource and incident management software, state-of-the-art mobile field command posts and pop-up “base camps.”
