Argh, I used to have so much respect for the AP and all of that has gone so far downhill with this pseudoscience explainer journalism...
Yes, of course, power outages are more frequent - we have an aging grid, more people, and more demand for electricity than any other time in history. But to draw the causation to global warming through two layers of indirection just screams agenda rather than facts and delegitimizes the true need for clean energy and a robust grid. It's embarrassing the AP publishes this garbage.
This claim is the most egregious:
"Outages tied to severe weather rose from about 50 annually nationwide in the early 2000s to more than 100 annually on average over the past five years."
Sounds awful but does not correct for the fact that the US population rose from
281.4m in 2000 to
331.5m in 2020 (with the majority of that being costal growth, most at risk for weather events) nor the fact that US electricity usage has increased the same during that same time from
3.4 trillion kwh to 3.8 trillion kwh nor the fact that the grid is 20 years older between those two time periods. Counting outages and comparing time periods directly is a useless statistic at best and deceptive at worse.
Hurricane Dorian and the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane both hit Florida with 185 mph windspeeds (highest of an Atlantic landfall hurricane in US recorded history). Dorian caused $5.1b in damage in 2019 dollars while the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane only caused $0.9b in damage in 2019 dollars. Is that because Dorian was 5x more powerful and destructive due to GLOBAL WARMING!?!? No, its because Florida is an order of magnitude more built up today than it was 85 years ago.
I'm a zealot for clean energy and grid robustness but this is absolutely the wrong way we get to that goal. I'll get off my soapbox now.