Billions Being Spent on Flood Mitigation and Storm Hardening in the Northeast
Utility spending on flood mitigation and storm hardening tactics is reaching an all-time high on the heels of the grim climate outlook. While utilities across the U.S. are working to shore up their infrastructures, utility companies in the Northeast seem to be taking these efforts to a different level. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Examples of Utility Flood Mitigation and Storm Hardening Tactics
ConEd, which supplies electricity to over 3 million households in New York City, is one example of a utility at the forefront of the hardening wave. After Hurricane Irene in 2011 and then Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused hundreds of thousands of power outages, the company started spending large sums of money to boost resilience and reliability. In fact, the company expects to spend $2 billion over the next 10 years on storm hardening tactics.
The framework for ConEd’s hardening investments is a planning process that factors in climate change and looks 20 years into the future. As part of this effort, the company is focused on undergrounding – in fact, over 85% of ConEd’s customers are serviced by one of the company’s 64 underground systems. And, the company is continuing to pursue additional undergrounding initiatives in extremely weather-prone areas. All told, ConEd estimates that its efforts have prevented nearly 700,000 outages since 2014.
National Grid, which has a staggering 20 million customers across 3 states, is another great example. The company’s planning process looks at scenarios up to 70 years into the future. As such, the company has ramped up efforts to identify weather-prone parts of its infrastructure in recent years, and spends nearly $1 billion each year on tactics like undergrounding, flood mitigation, coastal hardening, and replacing decades-old equipment.
A final example is NJ-based PSE&G, which announced plans to spend nearly $1 billion over the next 5 years on reliability, propped up by the launch of its Infrastructure Advancement Plan. It has also put much effort toward substation flood mitigation tactics, such as raising assets above flood lines and adding reclosers, which has proven effective considering that no substations flooded during Hurricane Ida, yet more than 24 flooded during Hurricane Irene and Sandy.
The bottom line is that utility emergency preparedness is not going to get any easier in the future, so now is the time to execute effective flood mitigation and storm hardening strategies and tactics.
