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BY MELISSA ENAJE
Tom Overbye talks grid infrastructure after Hurricane Beryl Tom Overbye serves as the director of Texas A&M University’s Smart Grid Center and is also a faculty member at the College of Engineering. He and his team work on developing better engineering tools for electric grid-related situations including resil- iency and severe weather impacts. This interview
As extreme weather becomes more common in the Gulf Coast region, what is the long-term strategy here? I think the conversation is going to be around building resiliency into the grid by hardening structures and providing the engineers with the best tools to plan the grid effectively, realizing that we can’t harden everything in the next couple of years. So we need to prioritize what gets hardened and look at which lines are at most risk and which ones are critical loads like hospitals. Should residents expect to lose power for a longer period of time? I certainly sympathize with people that have lost electricity for days. We all know that Texas in July gets pretty hot. I don’t think your readers should expect to have so many people lose power during a Category 1 storm. There’s design standards on this. ... The state knows this, and CenterPoint [Energy] knows this, and [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas] knows this. We’re certainly available to help in doing the research that needs to be done to help make our grid better.
has been edited for length and clarity. Why was Hurricane Beryl so severe?
I think the issue with this event isn’t that some people lost electricity—that would be expected in a hurricane—but that so many people lost electricity. ... I had a hard time believing it when I looked at the numbers on the power outage map and it was over 2 million. This is more of a transmission distribu- tion issue. Beryl was mostly a wires issue.
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