As part of Bloomberg's 2030 initiative to create a "greener, greater" New York City, called PlaNYC, we are coming together to focus on the "five dimensions of the city's environment--land, air, water, energy, and transportation" (from the Climate Change page). The first step of the climate change plan was to create a group called the New York City Climate Change Adaptation Task Force (CCATF) that was charged with developing strategies to future-proof and protect New York City's essential city infrastructure.Essentially, there are three stages: 1. Set climate risk information and assess implications; 2. Develope and prioritize adaptation strategies; 3. Formulate initial plans; and 4. Monitor and reassess. To start, CCATF's goals (albeit in typical bureaucratic manner) were to categorize the city's infrastructure in four sectors of the city's infrastructure (communications, energy, transportation, waste & water), and then identify key climate change implications from each of them. As of early December, and slightly behind schedule, we are identifying "at-risk infrastructure".
Some of these implications include:
1. Hotter air temperatures
- Overloads leading to brownouts/blackouts
- Increased fuel costs
- Increased cooling costs
- Fewer maintenance windows because of longer cooling season
- Increased required maintenance
2. Increased precipitation
- More flooding conditions
- More strain on discharge system
3. Rising sea levels
- Increased coastal erosion
- Permanent flooding
- Salt damage to equipment
4. Extreme events (e.g. heat waves, intense storms)
- Increased lightening activity, more power surges
It came into my hands to do some reading and research on National Grid's only New York City property, the Far Rockaway Power Station. My focus was primarily to assess the risk on the operations of our property. The plan by PlaNYC was to review our findings in a risk matrix using the "risk assessment Excel template" provided by those higher up. In it, we compare the likelihood of occurrence of impact versus the magnitude of consequence. Interestingly, plan looks only at the increase in air temperature, the increase in annual precipation, and the increase in sea level. Noticeably missing from this, includes increase in surface water temperature, increase in damaging winds, increase in severe thunderstorms, and increase in other extreme weather conditions.
I have referenced a much more comprehensive, draft copy of a climate change report by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) titled "Key Climate Variables Relevant to the Energy Sector and Electrtic Utilities". (For my purposes, EPRI is a research group for power and electric utilities. It is independent of CCATF and PlaNYC.) After reading correspondences and presentation note from PlaNYC, meeting minutes and summaries, I have came with my own summary for the New York City region:
Current climate annual averages:
Air Temperature: 55 deg F
Annual Precipitation: 43-50 in.
Sea level Rise: 1.3 in./decade
Mean Annual Changes Relative to baseline years (1971-2000) for 2020s:
Air Temperature: +1.5 – 3.0 deg F
Annual Precipations: + 0.0 – 5.0
Sea level Rise: + 4.0 – 7.0 in. (2 in/decade - 3.5in/decade),
from 3.4 (min) -9.1 (mean) - 14.0 (max)
It is particularly profound to predict the future these days, and when we do, what we find are only scary things. We hear of climate change and global warming in only the most qualitative terms, but only when we actually put cold and exacting numbers down on paper, do we have a sense of what we are really in for.
This is not like forecasting next week's snow storm. We already know that the storms of the future--the next decade, even--will be worse than those we have encountered globally thus far. What we are doing here is predicting or guessing exactly how much worse it will be when the "future" catches up to us. We are now trying seeing what we can do, if anything, to harden our infrastructure to brace for the imminent storms and what we can do to survive in new climate.