The country’s power system is hampered by the heatwave that is currently engulfing two-thirds of the country with record-setting temperatures.
The power company that runs New York City, Con Edison, urged residents to conserve electricity on Monday. As it performed repairs, it reduced the power supply to Brooklyn by 8%, and it did the same for Brooklyn and Queens, both yesterday. Additionally, thousands of people lost power as a result of the strain on the power grid.
Nearly all of the East Coast and Midwest, including Virginia and New Jersey, have experienced comparable outages. After severe thunderstorms late last week, power went out for thousands of customers in Philadelphia and Cleveland, and it hasn’t been restored because the area is battling high temperatures.
Due to the heat on the routes that passed through Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, Amtrak, the national railroad company, reported delays on Tuesday.
Power grid issues
The US power infrastructure is in danger due to this heatwave, which is highlighting.
In the most recent annual assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), parts of the Midwest, Texas, New England, and southern California are rated as having insufficient power reserves to operate in “above-normal” conditions.
In recent years, power grid strains have increased significantly. There were 60% more heat-related power outages between 2014 and 2023 than there were ten years prior, according to a report from Climate Central, which was released last year.
The US power grid is under new, growing pressures, including the prevalence of artificial intelligence data centers and the energy required to power them. Dominion Energy warned that northern Virginia’s data centers used up so much energy that it might not be able to maintain the rising demand in 2022.
As generative AI booms become more prevalent, that strain will only continue to grow on AI data centers. By 2030, the demand for power from AI server farms is anticipated to increase by 12 percent.
A cyberthreat from Iranian-backed “hacktivists” could target the US power grid at a vulnerable point, according to CNN’s report. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the US power grid cyberthreat sharing center has been checking the dark web for threats since it issued a warning on Sunday about potential cyberattacks.
According to the advisory, “hacktivists and Iranian government-affiliated actors frequently launch disruptive cyberattacks against US networks and Internet-connected devices in poorly secured areas.”
Hacktivists linked to Iran launched a water authority attack in Pennsylvania in 2023 with little success. US authorities discovered that hackers affiliated with Iran were responsible for cyberattacks on US healthcare facilities in 2024.
Source: Aljazeera
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