Chart of the Day

Re space weather, a National Academies Press report "Severe Space Weather Events--Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts:
A Workshop Report", is very interesting reading. (Scroll down for the free html formatted version of the report.)

Every year some huge swath of the country has its electricity knocked out by ice storms or hurricanes or some other disaster and it takes weeks, or even months, to get it back up again.

Wouldn't it be practical to have a federal corps of emergency utility workers who could be deployed into these areas?

Regular linemen organized in a sort of National Infrastructure Guard.

Kevin, you are aware that the US temperature anomaly trends slightly downward during precisely the period the chart claims ushered in a huge increase in weather-related grid outages, aren't you?

As stated, this chart doesn't even begin to pass the smell test.

There has been no significant increase in extreme weather over the period of that chart; certainly not a ten-fold increase. Therefore, the increases in extreme-weather incidents, both the number and the severity, indicate an aging grid and a grid operating much closer to maximum capacity.

Since the changes forced on electric companies by environmentalists require or encourage them to invest in more expensive, capital-intensive generating systems that produce intermittent power, we can expect the CO2-policy-forced changes to increase, rather than decrease, the sorts of incidents appearing on that chart.

If the chart is meant to show the impact of global climate change and encourage rapid changes, it's a lie. The correct response is the opposite: we need to stick to traditional, easy electrical generating sources and update and expand the grid if we are to see a decrease in the incidents reflected on that chart.

I am glad you found the electrical grid disturbance chart (your "chart of the day" on June 16) as particularly reflective of the quality of work on the recently released climate report . I agree, though perhaps for a different reason.

I find that you are typically good a smelling out BS on polls and studies -- even those, to your credit, where you agree with the findings. But you really missed it on this one. I immediately asked myself whether it made sense that weather-related outages had really increased 20-fold in 15 years. I questioned the chart in my blog, writing in part:

This chart screams one thing at me: Basis change. Somehow, the basis for the data is changing in the period. Either reporting has been increased, or definitions have changed, or there is something about the grid that makes it more sensitive to weather, or whatever (this is a problem in tornado charts, as improving detection technologies seem to create an upward incidence trend in smaller tornadoes where one probably does not exist). But there is NO WAY the weather is changing this fast, and readers should treat this whole report as a pile of garbage if it is written by people who uncritically accept this chart.

I did some actual checking, and called the gentleman at the EIA who owns and puts together the data set on which this is based. I reported what I found here, but in short he said:

He said that there may be an underlying upward trend out there (particularly in thunderstorms) but that most of the increase in this chart is from improvements in data gathering. In 1997, the EIA (and Makins himself) took over the compilation of this data, which had previously been haphazard, and made a big push to get all utilities to report as required. They made a second change and push for reporting in 2001, and again in 2007/2008. He told me that most of this slope is due to better reporting, and not necessarily any underlying trend. In fact, he said there still is some under-reporting by smaller utilities he wants to improve so that the graph will likely go higher in the future.

Further, it is important to understand the nature of this data. The vast majority of weather disturbances are not reported to the EIA. If the disturbance or outage remains local with no impact on any of the national grids, then it does not need to be reported. Because of this definitional issue, reported incidents can also change over time due to the nature of the national grid. For example, as usage of the national grid changes or gets closer to capacity, local disturbances might cascade to national issues where they would not have done so 20 years ago. Or vice versa - better grid management technologies might keep problems local that would have cascaded regionally or nationally before. Either of these would drive trends in this data that have no relation to underlying weather patterns.

Interestingly, apparently none of those "peer-reviewed settled science" guys who used the data even bothered to call him and make sure they understood what they were using, and no one in the editing and review process of this report looked at the chart and asked himself the most basic question -- does this really make sense? Do I really believe this?

Warren Meyer
www.Coyoteblog.com