The Government Accountability Office on Wednesday urged FERC and the Department of Energy to develop strategies for responding to increasing stresses on the electric grid from climate change.

GAO’s report cites threats to transmission and distribution lines from increased wildfire activity and predictions of more frequent droughts and changing rainfall patterns that could hurt hydropower generation in Alaska and the West.

“Extreme weather events have been the principal contributors to an increase in the frequency and duration of power outages in the United States,” GAO said, citing last year’s California heat wave and the February deep freeze in Texas.

GAO recommended that DOE, the lead agency for federal grid resilience efforts, develop a department-wide strategy. It said FERC, which regulates electric transmission and approves NERC’s mandatory grid reliability standards, should “identify and assess” climate change risks to the grid. The report said the agencies neither agreed nor disagreed with its findings.

“FERC must act to address the urgent threat that climate change poses to electric reliability,” FERC spokesperson Craig Cano said. He noted that FERC Chairman Richard Glick announced yesterday that the commission will host a technical conference on June 2 “to gather information, examine threats and identify solutions. The grid must remain reliable in response to the challenges from climate change and extreme weather.”

DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

Frank Rusco, GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, outlined the agency’s recommendations Wednesday during a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

GAO said DOE and FERC have taken some actions to improve grid resilience since the office identified the federal government’s management of climate change as a high-risk issue in 2013. It noted DOE’s 2015 partnership with 18 utilities to plan for climate change and its support of research through its Grid Modernization Initiative.

But it said DOE “does not have an overall strategy to guide its efforts,” recommending it follow its Disaster Resilience Framework, which calls for reducing risks by creating resilience goals and linking the goals to an overarching strategy.

“Developing and implementing a department-wide strategy that defines goals and measures progress could help prioritize DOE’s climate resilience efforts to ensure that resources are targeted effectively,” it said.

GAO credited FERC’s 2018 effort to collect information from grid operators on resilience and the commission’s announcement last month that it would open a new proceeding to examine the threats from climate change and extreme weather. (See Glick Eyes New Standards Following Texas Outages.)

But it said the commission should develop climate resilience standards and guidance and identify whether it needs congressional action to address climate risks. It also said FERC should evaluate whether to consider climate risks in approving projects such as hydropower facilities.

FERC “has not taken steps to identify or assess climate change risks to the grid and, therefore, is not well positioned to determine the actions needed to enhance resilience,” GAO said. “Risk management involves identifying and assessing risks to understand the likelihood of impacts and their associated consequences. By doing so, FERC could then plan and implement appropriate actions to respond to the risks and achieve its objective of promoting resilience.”

Severe Consequences

The agency said the consequences of inaction could be severe. “Warmer temperatures and more heat waves could affect all regions in the United States and could decrease the efficiency of electricity generation, transmission and distribution systems,” it said.

It cited a report that estimated the annual cost of outages to utility customers could increase from about $55 billion over the 2006-2019 period to more than $480 billion during the 2080-2099 period (2019 $) without “aggressive grid resilience mitigation measures.”

Another report, GAO said, predicted climate change could increase annual expenditures for transmission and distribution infrastructure in the contiguous U.S. by as much as 25% (about $25 billion) by 2090 versus 2015.

The agency acknowledged that investments to improve resilience are expensive. “And it can be difficult for utilities to calculate the return on such investments because the benefit typically is realized only when a major event threatens the reliability of service. As a result, these investments can be difficult to justify.”

Other Testimony

The Senate committee heard testimony from several other witnesses in addition to Rusco, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who recounted last summer’s heat wave. Temperatures in the San Fernando Valley hit 117 degrees Fahrenheit, with temperatures in Downtown LA hitting 108.

“Cables melted, neighborhood distributing stations overloaded, and some neighborhoods lacked power for upwards of three days. The takeaway here is that the significant amount of work [the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power] had been doing to maintain and upgrade infrastructure in the high heat zones of the San Fernando Valley paid off. It was those areas that hadn’t been upgraded to withstand extreme heat — areas that we just didn’t expect to get that hot — that were most affected,” he said.

He urged Congress to increase the electric vehicle tax credit to $10,000 for vehicles of $60,000 or less and eliminate phase out of credits when individual manufacturers hit a cap on sales. He also called for streamlining the permitting process for new transmission.

In her opening statement, ranking member Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) criticized President Biden for revoking the previous administration’s One Federal Decision policy, which called for early coordination and predictable timelines on environmental reviews of projects.

“It will be hard to deliver on clean energy if permitting complexity represents an insurmountable challenge,” she said. “Without the ability to timely permit new transmission, the ambitious goal set by President Biden of zero emissions by 2035 is just a costly pipedream.”