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Philippe Arsonneau of Schneider Electric explores how extreme weather events intensified by climate change are putting unprecedented pressure on power grids across Europe and the US and what can be done to improve resilience.
The effects of the extreme heatwaves and wildfires hitting continental Europe and the US this year have been hard to ignore.
This year, the US felt the heat early, with Minneapolis breaking a 115-year-old record in June as temperatures pushed the heat index to 41°C (106°F). The effects of the heat are all too real for billions of people: red warnings are in place, wildfires burn and floods have already caused devastation this summer.
The effect on our power grids is clear. In April 2025, a major blackout swept across Spain and Portugal, exposing cracks in Europe’s ageing grid. With summer heatwaves arriving early, Spain recording an unprecedented June high of 46°C and nearly all of France placed under heat alerts, countries like Spain, the UK and France are now scrambling to secure supply and avoid further outages.
With severe weather becoming more common because of global warming, nations cannot continue to buy their way out of impending calamities forever. Resilient energy systems are critical for continuing to serve customers during any disaster. Here’s how to build resilience against extreme weather.
Why is this important?
Extreme weather is growing more frequent – and the consequences are getting worse.
As our world changes in the face of global warming, an increasing multitude of extreme weather patterns now affect regions that historically did not face such natural events. This places an economic and social strain on larger swathes of the global population. The increase in natural disasters and severe weather seen globally demands a global change in how we distribute our power to increase resilience and limit the impact on communities.
Traditional energy distribution relies on networks connected by several nodes, overhead lines or underground cables. If one of those fails, the energy cannot be transmitted – that is, unless it is directed towards another appropriate route. When this assignment of a new route is done manually, it lacks efficiency. When multiple elements are broken or lost due to powerful, localised extreme weather events, the rerouting process is complex and time-consuming.
It is, therefore, essential that power systems worldwide continue to be updated to benefit from systemic resilience in the event of loss of centralised power due to weather events. The aims are as follows: predict and prepare for the expected impact, reduce the time to locate and isolate the faults, quickly define reconfigurations, enable progressive re-energisation of the system, and optimise mobilisation of resources for repair and full recovery of the normal situation.
The solution for all these aims starts with making grids smarter.
Have you read?
Europe Energy Briefs: Weather and climate and how they impact the energy system
Iberdrola invests €100m to redesign Valencia’s weather-torn distribution grid
What does a smarter grid look like?
Grid modernisation is bringing about innovations that could make grids much more resilient to extreme weather. This means that the grid’s technology can predict where an impact will occur, redirect energy, and deploy repair resources.
This is achieved through smarter, digital grids that can start the response through engaging their outage management system (OMS) modules – these can be part of an advanced distribution management system (ADMS). By predicting where an impact like a wildfire might hit, utilities can pre-emptively instruct the system to reconfigure energy to avoid an outage for customers, for instance by temporarily islanding a microgrid while engineers work to fix the damage.
Even when planning is not possible, utilities can rely on technology by using automatic network reconfiguration to reroute power. Many will leverage an optimised architecture based on motorised and communicating switchgear (circuit breakers, reclosers, sectionalizers) and Fault Passage Indicators (FPIs).
In short, grid operators can rely on higher-fidelity data availability, siloed data consolidation into integrated databases, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based applications for their decision-making. In essence, sensors and software produce data that enables well-judged, predictive, instantaneous, and automatic choices to protect citizens, businesses, and operations in moments of grid failure.
Say high winds bring down a tap. A smart grid pinpoints the closest suitable opportunity for a power diversion and automatically tells the network to use this route. Or it could suggest activating other networks and microgrids, such as those connected to local wind farms, which could tide communities over until the grid is restored.
In a wildfire, while outage management reroutes the power supply, a fire management module can use geo-awareness to detect affected equipment, minimising impact due to time saved and reducing potentially dangerous work for engineers.
Or perhaps a set of junctions have been flooded by stormwater. The outage management module predicts the damage and reroutes power while the grid is fixed. A digital twin for the network can identify what’s happened and why – reducing the time spent in diagnosis from hours to minutes. While engineers fix the lost nodes, customers aren’t left in the lurch.
How will this assist in combating the effects of extreme weather?
Beyond providing resilience, incorporating and transitioning to smarter grids based on data is crucial to the global shift towards greener, more sustainable energy. For instance, with a digital twin model of the network, engineers can replay the incident and figure out how to avoid it next time. By leveraging the full potential of digital technologies, energy grids can be incrementally improved with sustainable materials and approaches while costly disruption is reduced.
In a natural disaster or extreme weather event, critical services such as hospitals, emergency departments, and social infrastructure being cut off from power can have disastrous effects. To avoid the need for them to deploy their independent power – often coming from a diesel generator that’s far from sustainable – they must be able to rely on the grid’s ability to reroute power quickly.
In a hospital, this could keep life support machines on the most reliable source of power possible. In care homes, this could keep vital heating units running. In schools, children can continue learning without disruption, whatever storm rages outside.
Time is of the essence
Governments and organisations are beginning to wake up to the systematic changes to be made to limit global warming and its effects. However, while those changes happen, consumers will still suffer these effects unless resilience is rapidly introduced to existing energy systems.
The solution is to make networks smarter, so they can make better, faster and more sustainable decisions. This means that humans can then save time while maintaining the resilient grid and planning future improvements. This resilience increases the grid’s sustainability, which contributes to the longer-term goal of reducing climate change.
Maintaining a resilient grid allows organisations and governments to react to climate change while also making sustainable decisions that reduce climate change and save the Earth for future generations.
About the author
Philippe Arsonneau is senior vice president of Infrastructure Segment at Schneider Electric.
At Enlit Europe in Bilbao in November, there will be a special keynote session called Scenario Planning for Climate Change, in which utilities, power generators and technology providers share their scenario planning to ensure Europe has a resilient and adaptive energy system in the face of a changing climate. Click here for more details.
Originally published on Enlit World.
