5  Conclusion

Our study of renewable energy integration into the U.S. power grid has yielded insights into factors affecting its stability and resilience in the face of climate change. Though the portion of electricity generated by renewable energy sources, namely wind and solar, has indeed increased over time and especially in the last decade, grid reliability has not suffered. In fact, it may even be true that higher renewable penetration contributed to fewer and shorter outages. As the U.S. continues to transition to more renewable energy as forecasted by the Energy Information Administration, a relationship perhaps even more vital to understand is that between grid reliability and severe weather events by region. Diving into major outage days at the state level within especially unreliable years revealed the winter storms, tornados, and other types of extreme weather that led to those major outages as confirmed by reporting and other literature. Subsequently, our exploration of the combination of Texas’s daily outages and the comprehensive calendar of Texas’s severe weather events highlighted variability in different weather event types and their effects on the grid. As the intensity and frequency of these weather events grow, further investigation across multiple states and longer timelines could definitively indicate which weather event types are most disruptive to energy generation, allowing for knowledgeable investment in grid reliability in the U.S.