This is the first in a series of stories that will identify new technologies and actions that can slow climate change, reduce its impacts or help communities cope with a rapidly changing world.
Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez saw the future of energy on a broiling-hot day last September.
An email alert hit her inbox. It came from the San Diego Gas & Electric Co. “Extreme heat straining the grid,” it read. The message also pinged as a text to 27 million people. It asked customers to “save energy to help avoid power interruptions.”
And it worked.
People cut their energy use and the electric grid kept working. The campaign avoided blackouts. As a result, California successfully weathered a crisis worsened by climate change. “It was very exciting to see,” says Hidalgo-Gonzalez. An electrical engineer, she works at the University of California, San Diego. There, she studies renewable energy and the power grid.
This type of community response changes how people interact with the systems that provide us energy. And these will be crucial going forward as we figure out how to live with a changing climate.
Earth has warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid- to late-1700s. That’s when wide-scale burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels began belching out heat-trapping greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2). Scientists agree that only drastic action to cut greenhouse gas emissions can keep the planet from blasting past a global warming of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). That’s the threshold beyond which impacts become even more catastrophic than the rising sea levels and extreme weather our planet is experiencing now.
The goal is to achieve what’s…
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