When freezing weather caused power outages across North Carolina on Christmas Eve, Eliana and David Mundula quickly became concerned for their 2½-week-old daughter, whom they had brought home days earlier from a NICU.
“The temperature in the house dropped,” said Ms Mundula, who lives in Matthews, south of Charlotte. “I became angry.”
But her husband pulled out a small petrol generator that a neighbor had persuaded them to buy a few years ago so they could use a portable heater and get their fridge going again, which kept them running for much of the five-hour hiatus.
North of Charlotte, in the town of Cornelius, Gladys Henderson, an 80-year-old former cafeteria worker, was less fortunate. She had no generator and resorted to candles, a flashlight, and an old kerosene heater to survive another recent outage.
“I lose power almost all the time,” Ms. Henderson said. “Sometimes it goes off and just stays off.”
Ms. Henderson is on the losing side of a new energy divide that is exposing millions of people to dangerous heat and cold.
As climate change increases the severity of heat waves, cold spells, and other extreme weather conditions, power outages are becoming more frequent. In the 11 years to 2021, there were 986 weather-related power outages in the United States, nearly double the previous 11 years, according to government data analyzed by Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average U.S. utility customer lost power for nearly eight hours in 2021, more than twice as long as in 2013, the earliest year for which this data is available.
Outages are becoming so common that generators and other backup power equipment are considered essential by some. But many people like Ms. Henderson cannot afford generators or the fuel that runs them. Even after strong sales in recent years, Generac, the leading seller of home generators, estimates that less than 6 percent of US homes have a standby generator.
Energy experts warn that power outages due to weather extremes linked to climate change are becoming more frequent. And those blackouts will hurt more people as Americans buy electric heat pumps and battery-powered cars to replace furnaces and vehicles that burn fossil fuels — a change essential to curbing climate change.
“Networks are becoming more vulnerable,” said Najmedin Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California and an expert in disaster management. “It widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”
The elderly, the infirm and people living in poorly protected or insulated homes are most at risk, as are those who rely on electrically powered medical equipment or take medication that requires refrigeration.
Power outages make heat, already a leading cause of preventable deaths, an even greater threat, said Brian Stone Jr., a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He researched how many people in Atlanta, Detroit and Phoenix would be exposed to extreme temperatures during power outages.
“A simultaneous event where you have an extended blackout during a heatwave is the deadliest type of climate threat we can imagine,” he said, noting that the cooling centers in these cities could only accommodate a fraction of the largest Risk.
Ashley Ward, senior policy associate at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, has studied how heat affects communities in North Carolina. Her research shows that high temperatures cause more premature births. She said even healthy people who work in high temperatures often suffer from heat-related illnesses, especially if they can’t cool their homes overnight. “A power outage,” she said, “is in many cases a catastrophic event.”
North Carolina’s most recent power crisis, which occurred on Christmas Eve, occurred when the temperature in the Charlotte area dropped to 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
The state’s main utility, Duke Energy, began cutting power to customers to ensure the grid continued to function after power plants went out and customers turned up the heat in their homes. About 500,000 homes, or 15 percent of the company’s customers, lost power in North and South Carolina, the first time the utility has deployed rolling blackouts in the Carolinas.
The Mundulas had been through more weather-related power outages since moving into their suburban home. After renting generators during previous outages, the couple spent $650 to purchase one in August 2020 to power parts of their four bedroom, two and a half bathroom home. A chorus of engines usually fills their neighborhoods when the power goes out. “It’s just the hum of the generators,” Ms. Mundula said, adding that she never heard generators in Greensboro, the lower-income neighborhood where she grew up.
The pair have considered larger systems like solar with a battery, but those options would cost dearly.
Ms. Henderson, the retired cafeteria worker, lives alone in her three bedroom home. She relies on family, friends, and community groups to help her maintain the home, which gets its electricity from a community utility. Frequent power outages are one of several problems in their historically African-American neighborhood, which is also frequently flooded.
Developers have offered to buy her home, but Ms. Henderson wants to stay where she has lived for 50 years.
“My problem really is the electrical problem,” Ms. Henderson said. “It’s very scary.”
Duke said it was aware of the risks people like Ms. Henderson face. The company tracks recurring outages in vulnerable communities to determine if it should bury power lines to reduce the likelihood of blackouts. The company also develops and tests strategies to relieve the grid when energy demand exceeds supply. These approaches include electric cars feeding electricity into the grid and installing smart devices that can turn off devices, thereby reducing energy use.
“So if an extreme weather event occurs, we have a network that can withstand it or recover quickly,” said Lon Huber, senior vice president of customer solutions at Duke Energy.
Other web threats are harder to protect.
In early December, someone shot and damaged two Duke substations in Carthage, about 90 miles east of Charlotte, cutting power to thousands of homes for several days. Emergency services received panic calls from people whose oxygen machines stopped working, asking for someone to visit those homes and set up pressure tanks that don’t require electricity, city fire chief Brian Tyner said.
The chief’s home also has no backup power, and he estimates that two-thirds of the homes in the area don’t have generators. “We could never justify the price,” he said.
Backup power systems can be as small as portable gasoline generators, which can cost $500 or less. These devices are often found on construction sites and campsites and can only power a few devices at a time. Whole-home systems running on propane, natural gas, or diesel can provide power for days as long as fuel is available, but these generators start at around $10,000, including installation, and can cost much more for larger homes.
Solar panels coupled with batteries can provide zero-emission electricity, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars and typically cannot provide enough to run large appliances and heat pumps for more than a few hours. These systems are also less reliable on cloudy, rainy, or snowy days when there isn’t enough sunlight to fully charge the batteries.
Some homeowners looking to lower their carbon emissions, lower their utility bills, and become independent from the grid have combined different energy systems, often at significant cost.
Annie Dudley, a statistician from Chapel Hill, NC, drastically reduced her energy use a few years ago. She installed a geothermal system that uses the earth’s constant temperature to heat and cool her home, replacing an aging system that came with the home. She later added 35 solar panels on her roof and two Tesla home batteries, which can provide enough power to meet most of her needs, including charging an electric Volkswagen Golf.
“The neighborhood lost a fair amount of power, but I didn’t,” said Ms Dudley.
She spent about $52,000 on her solar panels and batteries, but $21,600 of that cost was met through rebates and tax credits. Ms. Dudley estimates that her electricity bills are reduced by approximately $2,300 per year as a result of this investment and her geothermal system.
Generator companies believe that growing power consumption and the risk of outages will keep demand for their products high.
Last year, Generac generated $2.8 billion in sales to US homeowners, up 250 percent from 2017. In recent years, many people have bought generators to ensure outages don’t interrupt their work from home, said Aaron Jagdfeld, general manager of Generac, based in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Many people also bought generators because of severe weather, including an extreme 2021 heatwave in the Pacific Northwest and Winter Storm Uri, which caused days of power outages in Texas and killed an estimated 246 people.
“People are thinking about it,” Mr. Jagdfeld said, “in the context of the broader climate changes and how that can affect not only the reliability of power supplies, but the things that they need that power supplies provide.”
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