New Jersey-based energy company Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) has released its 2013 Sustainability Report with a focus on the need for infrastructure that can better withstand severe weather.
Protecting critical infrastructure, the report says, is an important facet of climate adaptation. A key challenge is the need to improve society's ability to withstand and recover from extreme and changing weather patterns. PSEG says Superstorm Sandy was the worst storm in its history, and it was preceded only a year before by two other devastating storms.
On Aug. 12, the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Council of Economic Advisers released a report that assesses how to best protect the nation's electric grid from power outages that occur during natural disasters. The report, which recalls the 10th anniversary of one of the worst power outages in the U.S., calls for increased government and utility investment to modernize and harden the electric grid to better prevent power outages.
‘It is clear that that despite our best-in-class reliability, large parts of our existing infrastructure are not up to the test presented by the increasingly intense and destructive storms we've been seeing,’ says PSEG Chairman, President and CEO Ralph Izzo in a statement. ‘To be sustainable, we need not just reliability, but resiliency – the ability to mitigate impacts and respond more swiftly to storms that can cause so much damage.’
The company has proposed a $3.9 billion, 10-year plan to harden its infrastructure that it says has wide support from customers, municipal and county government, business and labor unions.
PSEG's 2013 Corporate Sustainability Report is available here.
