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This and other damages to the power system have left more than a million customers without electricity in the wider region, which is struggling with the effects of a hurricane and extremely high temperatures. Main utility company Entergy New Orleans said it could take weeks to fully recover.

Ida follows record heat waves in the Pacific Northwest in June, during which surges in electricity demand resulted in power outages in some areas and forced utilities to implement intermittent blackouts to prevent more serious problems. This, in turn, was closely linked to power outages in Texas that left four million people without electricity for several days in February, as cold temperatures spiked demand and froze wells and natural gas gathering pipelines.

Finally, in California, utilities cut power lines when high winds and fire risk intensified, in hopes of preventing the broken line from provoking another deadly hell, such as the camp fire that nearly wiped out the city of Paradise.

Each of these disasters, exacerbated or more likely by climate change, have disrupted our power systems in different ways: by creating spikes in demand, shutting down power plants, and shutting down power lines.

Each problem requires a different costly solution. But they all point to the same problem: the need to create a modernized, reliable, interconnected power generation and delivery system that can support light in the face of increasingly frequent and severe weather conditions.

Loss of electricity during heat waves, winter storms, floods and fires is not just an inconvenience. Very often it is a matter of life and death.

We need to insulate power plants so that they can operate safely in both the scorching sun and freezing conditions. We need to update our networks with sensors and software to help operators anticipate and avoid problems.

We need to develop a more diverse set of energy sources, as well as many more energy storage devices, to provide enough power to keep homes and businesses online in all weather conditions. And we need to tie together our creaky, fragmented systems to create more redundancy in our power plants, as well as in the towers and lines that bring electricity where it needs to go.