The Bureau of Meteorology says that it’s likely that this will be an El Niño year, drier and warmer. That is, it says, on top of the drier and warmer conditions that climate change predicts anyhow for much of Australia, especially the south east. It brings with it an increased risk of extreme heat.
In the aftermath of the Lismore floods, I had many readers of ‘470‘ comment that it was eerily prescient. How did I know?
I didn’t know. Not specifically. But I did know something like that would happen, somewhere like that, sometime in the near future. ‘470‘ was for me a journey of researching, thinking through, imagining what climate change might feel like to live through. I didn’t want to feel so helpless that I needed to shut my ears and eyes just for my own sanity.
The research involved a huge amount of critical reading, but the information is all there, in thousands and thousands of independent pieces of research all over the world. Climate change will make cyclones more severe and further south, and sea level rise will make the storm surge bigger. The wet season, so familiar to northern NSW residents, will move earlier and much more extreme. Not just predictable, but predicted.
The heat wave scenes are all based on solid research too. Not where and when, and not how people will handle it, but that’s the stuff that happens at 470ppm … it’s all petty well predictable (and the Riverina drought and the Chinese polar vortex and the California “atmospheric river” floods and the European hybrid storm and the Middle Eastern wet bulb heat wave and the ocean acidification effect on shellfish and the mosquito bourne diseases and the blue green algae in Brisbane water and … it’s all petty well predictable.)
And my ‘470‘ research came to the same conclusion as this week’s article in The Conversation – Australia’s electricity system is not up to the challenge of extreme heat. “An El Niño looms over Australia’s stressed electricity system – and we must plan for the worst” is the headline, and yes, my characters in ‘470’ were faced with the same challenge – days (multiple days) of extreme heat with the electricity grid down. And predictable too that transport systems will buckle and hospitals will be overwhelmed with heat victims.
Maybe not this year. But when you take the same risk often enough, eventually you get what you’re looking for.
So. What to do.
The “What can be done” bit at the end of the article needs to be done, needed to be done a decade ago – close the “aging coal plants” that are “contributing to reliability challenges in the energy system”, build more renewable energy and make the grid less monolithic, less dependent on mega-suppliers.
But it’s not going to be done this year. Or next. I’ll keep fighting for it but I want a Plan B for this El Niño, and the next one, and a few after that.
The solutions are going to be different for every household, depending on where in Australia or the world you are, depending on your house and your household and your dependence on the grid. But I think we all need to have a heat wave plan, like the bushfire plan, and like the bushfire plan, a plan to have a plan is not a plan.
At minimum:
- how to keep the house survivably cool without relying on grid power for air conditioning,
- how to provide power to the things that critically need power (like for example a CPAP machine),
- how to keep food from going off without a fridge,
- how to cook without electricity and/or without heating up the house even more,
- how to have reliable water supply without pumps, including those powering town water supply,
- how to keep animals (including outdoor animals like chooks) safe,
- how to set up gardens to survive,
- how to help protect elderly, disabled, unprepared or unhoused people in the community.
It’s quite a lot for a plan. And I’m sure there’s a lot more I’ve forgotten. What’s in your plan?
Oof.
I have a solar oven…
Maybe getting a battery to augment my solar panels should be back on the ahenda. I looked at it a couple of years ago, but it didn’t look to be cost effective.
I haven’t got a solar oven – that’s something I should look into. We keep looking at the battery option and keep deciding it’s still not *quite* cost effective. The technology is on the brink now for EV batteries to go both ways, so a charged up EV could power a house when the grid was down. But it’s going to be a lot more years before they get second hand and affordable for us. We do have a caravan inlet plug installed, so we can plug appliances directly into solar panel output, (running through a regulator and inverter) while the sun is shining. And we have a little Ecoflow battery for camping, that would run essential things overnight for a couple of days with no fridge or cooking or fans etc running off it.
Hi Linda, I’ve never thought about resilience in this way before, and likening it to a bushfire plan is so sensible. I’m in Adelaide and it’s not uncommon for us to have outages. Your list of considerations is super helpful and practical and will form the basis of my plans, but I would love a deeper dive on the variety of ideas on how to achieve each of them.