Boosting Reliability By Building Energy Systems for a Changing Climate

July 21, 2026

Extreme weather events and a changing climate should be considered when energy developers and grid operators are building their next project. Decisions about how these changes in our environment can cause energy disruption and grid blackouts should be based on research at the intersection of climate and energy systems. This is according to research published in Nature Energy by Micheal Howland, MCSC seed award recipient and the Jeffrey Cheah Career Development Professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Liying Qiu, a former MIT postdoc; Rahman Khorramfar and Shen Wang, current MIT postdocs; and Saurabh Amin, the Edmund K. Turner Professor in Civil Engineering at MIT. They have created a new way to make climate informed decisions to create better energy systems and reduce blackouts.

The researchers used decarbonized energy systems in Texas and New England, because of their distinctly different climates and energy systems. They found that an energy system designed based on historic climate patterns could increase energy failures as much as 500 percent by 2050. But when predicted trends due to climate change are taken into account when creating these systems, it improves the energy systems’ resilience for little to no additional cost.

In their work, the researchers used computationally-intensive, high-resolution models to conduct their analyses. They hope to soon develop models that will be more accessible to practitioners.

This work was supported by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, MIT Climate Grand Challenges, and the MIT Energy Initiative Future Energy Systems Center.