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| -Image by Copilot |
In this post and the next we'll be taking about the critical but largely invisible infrastructure that forms the backbone of modern life — power generation, communications networks and data centres. We encounter them mostly through everyday things like banking, airline bookings, billing, stock control and staying in touch with Auntie Flo, but they also control systems we rarely think about — managing water flows and power generation, running trains and traffic signals, and keeping us informed about what is happening elsewhere in the world.
Power generation provides the energy to operate these interconnected systems. Communications networks connect them to each other and to us. Data centres are more or less the brains that run them. None works effectively without the others — and all three are increasingly vulnerable to a changing climate.
Power Generation
Energy underpins virtually every aspect of modern life — transport, manufacturing, communications, even entertainment and of course keeping the lights on at home. Like air and water, we notice it only when it fails. Here are some of the ways in which Climate Change is now threatening power supplies.
Heat and Drought
Tasmania is well known for its hydro electric schemes, but in recent years its 'wets' have been getting wetter and its 'dries" have been getting drier." Hydro dams designed to produce electricity based on historic rainfall are failing to do so because of higher temperatures, greater evaporation and longer and more severe droughts. During the 2015–16 drought in Tasmania, Hydro Tasmania was forced to scramble for diesel generators and to press mothballed power stations into service as well as call for industrial load -shedding to make up for a 40% shortfall in supply.
Part of the reason for the shortage was not because Tasmania had not planned for such an eventuality, but because the cable which was to transfer additional electricity from the mainland in those circumstances (and also works the other way), had failed and did not come on stream again until over a year later.
Though the failure was not directly due to climate change, prolonged drought and the cable outage, turned what would have been an inconvenience at other times, into a crisis. A second undersea cable to bring additional power when necessary to ensure energy security in dry periods, is now in the pipeline so to speak, but Tasmania is by no means alone.
Global hydropower generation fell 8.5% in the year to mid-2023 — more than any full-year decline over the last two decades — with three-quarters of that decline occurring in China, which experienced record temperatures and severely reduced rainfall. The IEA confirms generation decreased due to persistent droughts across Canada, China, India, Vietnam and the United States.
Higher temperatures and more frequent droughts have also forced the shutdown of nuclear plants. During heatwaves in 2024, France, Switzerland and Japan have been forced to shut down or reduce output at nuclear plants because the rivers used for cooling became too hot — the Golfech plant on the Tarn-et-Garonne was shut down amid concerns the local river could reach 28°C even before absorbing the heated discharge water.
Surging demand for air conditioning has compounded the problem further. In 2024, more than 40 countries representing nearly 70% of global electricity demand — including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and the United States — reached new peak demand records during heatwaves, while many others suffered major power outages and rolling blackouts.
In Texas alone, every 1°C increase above 24°C drives a 4% rise in electricity demand, carrying the direct threat of shortages, restrictions, blackouts and brownouts. Data centres — the physical backbone of our digital world — are adding further significant demand to these already stressed power and water grids, a problem examined in more detail in the next post.
Disruption due to Extreme Weather Events
The trend is unambiguous and accelerating. Of all major power outages in the United States between 2000 and 2023, 80% were caused by weather with double the number of such outages in this decade than in the one before. In 2024, Americans lost more hours of power than in any year in the previous decade, with outages from major weather events averaging nearly nine hours per customer. Australia too has its own stories about power failures.
It was a lighting strike which started the East Gippsland fires in already very dry conditions in Australia's Black Summer of 2019-20. In Southern Victoria, Mallacoota's residents were left without power or regular supplies for most of January 2020, with the town's only road in and out closed for around six weeks. The town was not reconnected to the main power grid until the 8th of February. Ironically, AusNet had proposed installing a community battery in Mallacoota back in 2018, intending to have it operational before the 2019-20 fire season, but it wasn't ready in time. When it was finally installed after the fires, it was called upon successfully twice within its first two weeks of operation.
Not that renewables are without their problems either, especially during the transition. It was an excess of incoming solar power, into Spain's grid in 2025 which triggered the largest outage in European history and cut power to 47 million users across Spain, Portugal and parts of France. Although partially due to operator error, the system was especially vulnerable, because it did not have adequate battery storage needed to buffer such surges and its interconnections with the rest of Europe were well below EU targets.
What Can be Done
General principles for avoiding disruption due to power outages are basically as follows:
- Strengthening and modernising existing infrastructure
- Duplicating and diversifying supply
- Decentralising grids so that they can continue to function independently even if the main power supply is cut off. More detail and some examples follow.
Strengthening and Modernising Grids
The Spanish incident was not the fault of renewables, indeed renewables offer one of the best opportunities for diversifying supply and meeting additional demand, not just from air conditioning and data centres, but also EVs and for the millions of people around the world who do not yet have reliable electricity. Greece was able to avoid such shutdowns despite experiencing identical weather conditions, because the operator was able to order thousands of medium size solar producers to shut down before the system became overwhelmed.
Smart Grids and Real-Time Monitoring
Beyond physical infrastructure, the Spanish blackout exposed a serious gap. The official investigation found that its grid operator lacked real-time monitoring, with no risk identified even as voltage levels approached critical thresholds and which would have enabled them to react more quickly. Spanish authorities and the industry are now hastening to add battery storage and grid - forming inverters.
Smart grids — combining real-time sensor networks, automated protective responses and grid-forming inverters capable of stabilising frequency in milliseconds — represent the modern standard that ageing grid management systems have yet to meet.
Diversification
In May 2021, an explosion at the Callide coal-fired power station in Queensland cut power to more than 470,000 customers, from Queensland to New South Wales. However, the Hornsdale Power Reserve battery in South Australia was able to stabilise the grid within two seconds. It was not the first time either. In December 2017, within two weeks of going online, Hornsdale had already stepped in twice when coal units at Victoria's Loy Yang power station tripped unexpectedly. In all three cases the culprit was ageing coal infrastructure, not renewables.
Grid - forming inverters at Hornsdale prevented the "black start" problem encountered in Spain - that is, the power grid not being able to start again once completely stopped.
The solution then, is not to slow the renewable transition but to invest in grid-scale battery storage, grid - forming inverters, pumped hydro to absorb surplus generation and stronger interconnections between national grids.
Decentralisation
The complementary principle is decentralisation — building microgrids like the one in Mallacoota, with their own generating capacity and storage, and capable of isolating themselves from the main grid when it fails, would ensure continued supply to essential services such as hospitals, water supply and treatment plants and emergency services.
Poles, Wires, Substations and Transmission Towers
In some cases simply replacing wooden power poles with steel can provide greater resilience, but anyone who saw what happened to Darwin's steel transmission lines during Cyclone Tracy -they looked like tangled spaghetti, will know that will not be the answer in every situation and, as engineers will attest steel also performs poorly under intense heat and fire conditions.
Putting wires underground is the preferred but more expensive solution, except where they could be prone to flooding or corrosion from seawater. When Storm Gudrun hit Sweden in January 2005, outages in rural areas with overhead lines lasted up to 20 days, while urban areas with underground cabling were restored within hours.The cost is high upfront and maintenance is more difficult, but savings in restoration costs and economic disruption can justify it in high-risk areas.
Replacing traditional wood poles with fibreglass, reinforced concrete or other composite materials offers greater resilience to both high temperatures and fire than either wood or steel.
In California, which has experienced its share of megafires, utility companies now pre-emptively shut down power lines during periods of high fire risk, using technology that cuts power before fallen conductors can spark fires in dry vegetation below. Clearing vegetation under transmission lines, also reduces the risk of sparking and tree removal also helps to prevent outages. In Michigan for example, places with good vegetation management and tree clearing around powerlines had 46% fewer outages.
Power stations and substations in low lying areas or near the sea, should be moved to higher ground, or where that's not possible as in parts of Florida or Australia, they should be elevated and be protected against flooding.
There is no single solution. The right answer depends on whether the primary threat is fire, cyclone, flood or heat.
Special Considerations with Respect to Hydro - Electric Generation
Hydropower remains a cornerstone of renewable energy, but it too is increasingly plagued by lower flows, less snowmelt and higher rates of evaporation as warming continues. While the major remedies for this have been discussed in Part 1, managing fluctuating water availability in hydropower generation largely comes down to smarter operations and better planning.
This means using seasonal climate forecasts - not historical data, to optimise water storage and release and coordinating hydro dispatch with solar and wind output to smooth supply during low-flow periods.
Deep cold lakes should be preferenced over over shallow rivers for new projects and in some cases, negotiating transboundary water-sharing agreements to compensate for regional variability may also be necessary. The International Hydropower Association's updated Hydropower Climate Change Resilience Guide sets out the emerging international standard for incorporating all of these considerations into project planning and operations.
Special Considerations re Nuclear Reactors
Higher temperatures and low water flows have already placed major constraints on nuclear energy production. For example, the 2003 European heatwave forced shutdowns and output reductions at some 30+nuclear plants across the continent and heatwaves continued to force curtailments in 2006, 2015 and 2018, when France shut down four reactors citing dangerously high temperatures in the Rhone and Rhine rivers. For this reason the World Nuclear Association recommends upgrading to air-cooled or closed-loop cooling systems, siting new reactors near deep water rather than shallow rivers, and integrating nuclear output into grid forecasts to compensate for weather-related shutdowns. A word of caution however.
While siting near the sea may have merits for cooling purposes, it could result in Fukushima - style flooding which could disable those very cooling systems reactors rely on. Greenpeace has specifically challenged France's plans for two new reactors at its Gravelines plant near Dunkirk as inadequately protected against future sea levels. Again, given the long lead time for large infrastructure projects, it is important to build in a large margin for error since Climate Change is proceeding much faster than anticipated.
While the power company has raised the proposed facility somewhat above present sea levels, Greenpeace warns that high tides combined with a 100-year surge event, could put the entire Gravelines power plant below sea level by 2100 -only halfway through the proposed reactor's lifespan.
Communications
Many of the concerns and remedies of the above-ground architecture with respect to power transmission also relate to our communications infrastructure — indeed in some cases, as with Basslink, they share the same physical infrastructure.
Communications are often the first casualty of the very disasters they are meant to manage and usually depend on the same power grid which may already be stressed by extreme heat and flooding.
Cell towers go down during emergencies either through power shutoffs or when overhead fibre lines on utility poles are damaged directly, or because too many people are trying to get information at once - about conditions, evacuation routes, loved ones or what to do about their horses or cats.
I have a little personal experience of this. Back in 2016, I was in the remote West Coast town of Zeehan when it was threatened by fire. Paywave didn't work so I had to give my remaining cash to the Caravan Park. My phone didn't work, so I had no idea what was going on. When I sought to leave, all the petrol pumps were either already shut or would not accept my card, nor would any of the ATMs. The shops could not give me any cash because their systems were also down. I don't know whether this was pre -emptive or because the fire had already done some damage, but it was the same in the next two towns. Just before the third, almost 100 km away, when I was running on fumes, I finally got a signal at a high point in the road and was able to get my card unblocked at the bank - three tries and they lock it down. Now multiply that by the 300,000 people who had to evacuate in Texas just before Hurricane Harvey, though emergency services are getting progressively better at it since Hurricane Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed fibre optic cables, knocked out more than 1,000 cell towers — over 30% of sites in the affected area — and cut three million customer phone lines, with 350,000 people still without phone service weeks later and three 911 call centres out of action. Since then, partly as a result of lessons learned, emergency measures often include truck -mounted mobile services and even drones to restore some connectivity. Reverse charging from Electric Vehicles (V2G) is also being considered.
Satellites
These days satellite technology provides an alternative pathway when terrestrial communications fail, and services like Starlink now blanket even the most remote parts of Australia. However, satellites are not infallible. Ground stations — the terrestrial anchor points without which satellites cannot function — are as exposed to flooding and storm damage as any other infrastructure. Solar storms pose a different threat entirely. In May 2024, the most powerful geomagnetic storm in twenty years disrupted GPS and communications satellites globally, and in 2022 SpaceX lost 40 Starlink satellites to a single storm the day after their launch. Like all modern communications, satellites also depend on power at the receiving end — without a generator or battery backup, even a functioning satellite overhead is of no use during a blackout.
Subsea Cables
The global network of subsea cables carrying over 99% of international digital data traffic also faces growing climate risks. Chief among them are sea level rise and storm surges which threaten their usually coastal landing stations and land - based connections with flooding, erosion, abrasion and damage to cables. Storm and cyclone activity threaten their power supplies and connections and increased river flooding accelerates sediment flows which have already damaged multiple cables off the West African coast. Changing ocean currents are increasing sediment mobility and wear on cables. More intense Atlantic storms are cutting internet connections and tropical storms in the Caribbean are causing widespread damage to cables and landing stations.
Although shipping and bottom fishing currently do more damage to cables, weather related damage is increasing and has the potential to cause disruption over much larger areas. For example, one study of the impact of sea level rise in the USA found that thousands of kilometres of on-shore cable which was never designed to be immersed in water, could become submerged by 2030.
Key measures recommended by the International Cable Protection Society include the following:
- Increasing the armouring of shore ends to prevent erosion
- Avoiding low lying areas for landing points and landing stations
- Gathering local knowledge from site visits
- Incorporating ocean modelling and scientific data sets in the early stages of planning.
It is to the credit of this industry that its anticipation of such challenges has meant that despite an increase in the length of cables and an intensification of weather -related events in the last decade, the number of disruptions per unit length of cables has not increased.
The next post will be about Data Centres which are also vulnerable to climate change and becoming increasingly controversial.
Big thank you to Copilot for the illustration, Ecosia, ChatGPT and Claude for answering lots of questions, endless discussions and for finding references for me.
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