After the Storm... Crisis Averted?

Re-reading my last post, and thinking back to how things actually unfolded in January, I can’t help but think that I seemed a little dramatic. We did get winter weather, and the city of Austin was shut down for a few days. However, we had minimal power outages, limited to a handful of isolated interruptions.

Now, was this because the city of Austin has perfectly upgraded their transmission and distribution system to be impervious to winter weather? Well, maybe… but unlikely in my opinion. You see, the weather that we experienced that weekend was not the same as the weather that knocked out lines across the city in 2023. Other parts of the country, particularly in the Southeast, did see that sort of weather.

Here in Austin, we ended up receiving much more sleet than freezing rain, which led to less ice acumulation on our infrastructure. But this brings me to a bigger (and perhaps obvious) point. All storms are not created equal, and that can make it very challenging to assess how resilience evolves over time. It’s hard to say whether you’ve improved your ability to withstand certain conditions until those conditions occur again - which is particularly difficult when the conditions that you’re concerned about, by definition, occur infrequently.

How then do we determine whether our investments have been worth it? While researchers and practitioners haven’t landed on a single answer yet, I believe this question will be at the center of future regulatory proceedings as utilities attempt to address resilience concerns in our changing climate.

Sources

1. https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2026-01-23/austin-tx-winter-storm-weather-freezing-rain-low-temperatures