Fresh Take: As Extreme Weather Spreads, The U.S. Energy Grid Suffocates

It’s hot out. How are you holding up? New York City’s heat wave is finally starting to break thanks to thunderstorms, but hot temperatures continue to suffocate many places across the country—from California to Texas and beyond. It’s a concerning trend, and not just from a personal health perspective.

The energy grid can’t take it. Power outages from heat aren’t as common as those caused by other severe weather events—yet. But climate change will only make it worse. That’s why I appreciated this piece in The Hill this week, which points out that extreme weather is already doing damage.

Tornadoes shut off power for 300,000 in Chicago this week, and a hurricane caused 2.7 million in Houston to lose electricity earlier this month. As Tara D. Sonenshine, a senior fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University writes, “Bad weather is stressing an already-stressed American power grid—one that is decades old at a time when we want more electricity, despite a shortage of power lines.”

Keep that in mind as you hydrate and stay cool this weekend!

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

Order my book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, out now from Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books.

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Field Notes

After last week’s spritz story, I had to celebrate with a sunlit spritz, some oysters and olives.

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Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.