Air conditioning saves lives. But as the planet warms, more AC use stresses the grid and drives up emissions, accelerating climate change.
for failing to deliver electricity, as they do in regulated states. And because it’s not intricately connected to its neighbors’ energy grids, Texas can’t import lots of power from elsewhere when demand spikes, like during this heat wave or. That isolationist stance has left it ill-prepared to weather the extremes of climate change.
“Texas, once again, is in a unique position where basically they’ve isolated themselves from the rest of the grid,” says Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. This has caught the state up in an increasingly nasty feedback loop: As summers warm, people need to run more AC to avoid discomfort and heat illness. But that requires more energy, which results in more emissions that further heat the planet and ultimately increase demand for air conditioning. “The hotter it gets, the more we run the AC, and the less reliable the grid becomes,” says Wagner.
This will be a problem all over the world, especially in economically developing nations, where more people are joining the middle class and are able to pay for technologies like air conditioning. “AC is really critical—it’s absolutely life-saving,” says University of California, Los Angeles’ Edith de Guzman, director and cofounder of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative.
on the US grid last year. “Not only is there a higher demand, but it’s at exactly the time that’s already the critical point for the grid.”
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