Public, private measures seen as key to increasing resilience against extreme weather, natural disasters

Local developers and planning leaders learned recently about the impacts that increasingly severe weather and natural disasters will have on their projects, and how public and private efforts can work together to reduce the damage.

Among the areas of focus at the October panel discussion from Urban Land Institute Austin was the aid available from local counties to make building projects more efficient and stable, Austin’s move to turn local gathering places into resiliency hubs and the ways Austin Energy is using technology to improve recovery after mass outages such as the February winter storm.

Charlene Heydinger, president of the Texas PACE Authority, emphasized to the room that the state’s low-interest loan program created a decade ago is ready to assist builders and developers worried about how to pay for resilient features that use less water and energy and are being required by building codes and insurance carriers. Heydinger said participation in Travis County’s PACE program has been extremely low, meaning local builders are leaving cheap money on the table as borrowing and construction costs continue to increase.

“We’ve had a really anemic response to this in Austin and in Travis County, and I think it’s because when you first heard about it back in 2015, when the first program was created, money was free, power was free, water was free, so why would anybody do the extra engineering for an alternative source of capital?” she said. “None of those things are true anymore. … We’ve done $454 million in permanently affixed energy- and water-saving measures, and only 4 percent of that is in Travis County.”

Danny Ee, director of smart grid and systems operations for Austin Energy, said the utility has greatly increased its use of artificial intelligence, smart sensors and other smart devices to gather more accurate information about outages and other problems in the system. In a case like the February storm that caused some homes to lose power for more than a week, Ee said Austin Energy could use that data to remotely reroute energy transmission to undamaged lines and greatly reduce the time spent manually inspecting and repairing lines.

“If there is something that’s happened on a certain part of the line, we isolate that certain section only and then bring power back onto the rest of the line. So it’s kind of self-healing,” he said. “If it’s a big storm, maybe we have thousands of places (without power). Imagine if we can cut down three-quarters of them by having autonomous controls, then we can efficiently use our crews to go to those areas that really need help and fix it and everybody benefits from it.”

In response to a question about burying power lines, Ee said that is one scenario the utility is exploring but cautioned that the cost and logistics involved in the initial burying or needing to make underground repairs later present problems.

“One of the most important thing is cost. It’s very expensive to go underground, and when we look at underground at high level, you think, oh, you just take the line and put the wires down. There’s a lot of miscellaneous stuff that goes with it,” he said. “How are you going to interconnect the houses to this underground (system)? Now the whole infrastructure has changed from the houses to the pole up there.”

Marc Coudert, climate resilience and adaptation manager for the city’s Office of Resilience, said City Council’s action to hire a director of resilience and prioritizing the creation of resilience hubs is a continuation of more than a decade of work looking at how local libraries, community centers and other gathering places could be equipped to help people in times of crisis.

“About six years ago, we started to reach out to community groups and say, ‘What’s going on in the community when it comes to climate impacts?’” he said. “We’re talking about not just the shocks, which everybody talks about – like Winter Storm Uri or the heat wave. I’m also talking about stressors like day-to-day events that impact people’s lives and their ability to push forward, like heat waves or bad air quality.”

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