Your power is out? Prepare to wait a long time.

As if hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires weren’t bad enough, they’re often followed by power failures, nature’s way of kicking you when you’re already on the floor. Oh, you lost your roof? Well, now your ice cream’s all melted too.

And as the frequency and intensity of weather disasters rises, new research finds that electrical grids are buckling under the stress more and more. The length of power outages in the U.S. has doubled over the past decade, according to a recent study by Eric Selmon and Hugh Wynne of the Connecticut research firm SSR, a trend driven almost entirely by extreme weather. This electricity loss threatens lives and amplifies the physical and economic pain of climate catastrophes.

The average time a utility customer is without power each year has doubled from 219 minutes in 2013-15 to 443 minutes in 2022-24, according to Selmon and Wynne’s analysis of Energy Information Administration (EIA) data. (The numbers are given as three-year averages to smooth out peaks and valleys.) The number of service interruptions each year has risen by a less dramatic 13%, suggesting utilities are increasingly struggling to get power restored after failures.

And if you include only "major event days," when storms, floods or fires happen, then the average time without power each year has risen 180% over the past decade, according to the EIA data. The average length of any one service interruption has risen 77%, mainly because of those major event days, on which average power failures rose from 495 minutes to 817 minutes.

These numbers "show an industry that is still learning to handle the increased severity of storms, floods and fires, with little success in reversing the sharp deterioration in reliability that they have caused," Selmon and Wynne wrote. This "creates rising regulatory, political, and financial risks for utilities."

It’s also a growing problem for customers, of course, one that goes well beyond melted ice cream. The disaster-blackout confluence can turn deadly if, for example, it happens during a heat wave, as happened after Hurricane Beryl hit Houston in 2024. The weeklong power outage and brief heat wave that followed contributed to at least 13 deaths by Houston Public Media’s count. A longer heat wave and blackout could cost at least 600 lives in that city, according to a Washington Post analysis that year. Call it a "heat Katrina."

High temperatures alone, without an accompanying hurricane or other disaster, often overwhelm power grids and put customers at risk. Even when they’re not fatal, those risks are significant. Extreme heat causes illnesses such as dehydration and heatstroke. It exacerbates heart and lung ailments, diabetes and mental illness. It leads to pregnancy complications. It saps worker productivity.

Grids are strained even more when heat waves happen during spring or fall, when some power plants shut down for maintenance. That was part of the problem in New England last week, when some plants had to burn oil to meet demand during the record-smashing, July-like heat that smothered the Northeast.

A hotter planet means summerlike conditions are bleeding into spring and fall more often. The length of "heat wave season," the time of year when extreme heat is most likely, has nearly tripled from 24 days in the 1960s to 70 days in the 2020s, according to archived Environmental Protection Agency data.(1) Summer has started earlier and become hotter over the past few decades, and its transitions have become far more abrupt, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of British Columbia.

Global heating is also supercharging the natural catastrophes that threaten the grid. All of this comes as energy demand is soaring because of power-hungry data centers, raising the risk of "potentially rapid deterioration" in the grid’s ability to deliver power, according to the SSR study.

In its latest long-term grid reliability assessment, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation called five of the 15 regions it tracks at high risk of being unable to supply enough power to meet demand at some point between now and 2030. Three of these regions are the biggest in the U.S., including the vast mid-Atlantic and Midwestern area served by PJM Interconnection, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Texas’ ERCOT. Together, the five regions account for more than half total U.S. peak energy demand.

Fortunately, grid reliability seems to be something of a bipartisan concern, especially with ballooning electricity costs affecting the midterm elections. Unfortunately, recent responses have been disappointing at best, focused mainly on propping up the fossil-fuel energy that’s helping to cook the planet. For example, the so-called Power Plant Reliability Act passed by the House last year is basically life support for coal plants, which are dirtier, more expensive to operate and fail more often than alternative power sources, note Mike O’Boyle and Silvio Marcacci of the think tank Energy Innovation.

Such solutions aim to bulk up old-fashioned supply without addressing soaring demand. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning has written recently about the many fixes on the menu that tackle the other side of the ledger, including encouraging customers to use less power in peak hours and make them "active participants in the grid." These ideas don’t yet have the political or institutional traction they deserve.

For the time being, power failures will remain one of the many ways disasters compound in a hotter, more dangerous climate. Nature already has more than enough ways to hurt us. We still have sway over greenhouse gases and the electrical grid, if we could just find the wisdom to exercise it.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal.