Twice this year, my home has gone dark in the middle of what used to be ordinary summer thunderstorms. Quite frankly, I am over it. Our nation’s infrastructure should be strong enough to withstand your typical Midwest thunderstorms.
This isn’t the first time I have written about storms knocking my power out. Back in 2020, I wrote about a tornado that tore through my town, when entire neighborhoods were left without power for days. I have also written about being without power when a blizzard and sub-zero temperatures came through my region.
This year alone, Chicagoland has already seen multiple rounds of severe thunderstorms capable of producing straight-line winds strong enough to bring down trees and power lines across wide areas. Bartlett had a tornado touch down and Naperville saw a tornado form. Each time, tens of thousands of customers lose electricity at once. Each time, crews work around the clock.
To be clear, crews work quickly and swiftly to restore power each time this happens. They aren’t at fault here. The challenge is we are in a reactive cycle with our infrastructure. The problem is our infrastructure was not designed to handle bad weather at this scale or frequency when it was built decades ago.
Chicagoland doesn’t need more reminders that the grid is under stress. We already have them—flashing, repeatedly, every time the lights go out. Chicagoland isn’t alone in this either. From the freezing in Texas to the hurricanes in the South, and the wildfires in the West, too many people know exactly what I am talking about right now. Our infrastructure is failing far too often.
The power grid we rely on was largely built around assumptions that no longer hold true. That severe disruptions would be rare, localized, and quickly repaired. But we are now seeing a confluence of factors all happening at the same time—aging infrastructure and increasing natural disasters in terms of frequency and severity, just to name a few. All this is coming together at the same time and making restoration more complex and outages more widespread.
The hard truth is we are still mostly responding to these events rather than redesigning for them. There is a difference between recovery and resilience. Recovery is restoring power after everything goes dark. Resilience is making sure fewer people go dark in the first place, and for less time when they do.
We talk about resilience often, but we rarely invest in what it actually requires. That means hard decisions such as upgrading and hardening distribution systems, selecting underground lines in high-risk areas, expanding redundancy so one failure doesn’t cascade across entire regions, and updating planning models to reflect the climate reality we are already living in today, not the one we wish still existed.
If we can have computers leveraging generative AI (artificial intelligence) for nearly everything, why can’t we have something fundamental like power during a storm? I know I am preaching to the choir here and that the answer to this question is rather obvious: We need the workers to build and maintain this infrastructure of the future.
The hard reality is the storms will keep coming. That much is no longer in question. What is in question is whether our infrastructure, our policies, and our expectations will evolve fast enough to keep up. We need to take action to rebuild more resilient infrastructure. The time is now.
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