  Hurricanes have caused power outages and blackouts, affecting millions of
customers and inducing severe social and economic impacts. The impacts of
hurricane-caused blackouts may worsen due to increased heat extremes and
possibly increased hurricanes under climate change. We apply hurricane and
heatwave projections with power outage and recovery process analysis to
investigate how the emerging hurricane-blackout-heatwave compound hazard may
vary in a changing climate, for Harris County in Texas (including major part of
Houston City) as an example. We find that, under the high-emissions scenario
RCP8.5, the expected percent of customers experiencing at least one
longer-than-5-day hurricane-induced power outage in a 20-year period would
increase significantly from 14% at the end of the 20th century to 44% at the
end of the 21st century in Harris County. The expected percent of customers who
may experience at least one longer-than-5-day heatwave without power (to
provide air conditioning) would increase alarmingly, from 0.8% to 15.5%. These
increases of risk may be largely avoided if the climate is well controlled
under the stringent mitigation scenario RCP2.6. We also reveal that a moderate
enhancement of critical sectors of the distribution network can significantly
improve the resilience of the entire power grid and mitigate the risk of the
future compound hazard. Together these findings suggest that, in addition to
climate mitigation, climate adaptation actions are urgently needed to improve
the resilience of coastal power systems.
