Abstract
The devastating impacts of climate change make themselves known in the form of fires, floods, droughts, storms, extreme heat and cold, and worsening socioeconomic conditions around the globe. At the same time, the U.S. electricity system has never been more vulnerable to severe weather. Even as we embark on a national project to decarbonize the electricity system by 2035, the U.S. leads the developed world in power outages. These outages are in large part due to aging infrastructure, improperly weatherized systems, vegetation crashing down on transmission and distribution lines and—perhaps most devastating of all—wildfires caused by fallen power lines in places where drought and poor land management have made the surrounding area a veritable tinderbox. But even though the country is experiencing more frequent and intense bouts of extreme weather due to climate change, not enough is being done to make the electricity system more reliable or resilient.
This Article argues that climate change adaptation should be considered a separate category from both grid reliability and resilience. This is true for three reasons: first, regulatory approaches to reliability and resilience reflect old ideas and maintain utility economic interests; second, those same utility interests are partly responsible for the brittle state of the grid; and third, most existing proposals for climate adaptation will result in skyrocketing consumer energy bills, without any guarantee of effectiveness. By reframing climate adaptation as a separate category of risk and regulation, lawmakers can approach regional planning for disasters in creative ways and remove the cost of adaptation measures from regulated rates, recognizing that electricity systems are critical infrastructure. In making this argument, this Article engages with the current state of utility regulation to illustrate that there is no clear path to safe, reliable electricity in the climate change era without fundamentally changing how utilities and regulators engage with these issues.
Recommended Citation
Kristen van de Biezenbos, Climate Proof Electricity, 2025 ULR 49 (2025)
