Madeline Yozwiak , a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, will give the talk, "Grid Hardening and the Effectiveness of Climate Adaptation in the U.S. Electricity Sector," at noon on Wednesday, March 18, in 157 Hosler Building at Penn State University Park. The event is part of a spring seminar series hosted by the Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI). Talk is free and open to the public.
Grid hardening practices like replacing poles, burying lines underground, elevating substations or managing vegetation are actions designed to mitigate risks to the electric grid and protect utility customers from outages.
"A central question in climate economics is how well society can adapt to climate change," Yozwiak said. "I study the effectiveness of climate adaptation in a critical sector: the electricity system. Over the last decade, U.S. utilities have spent billions on 'grid hardening' in an effort to increase the reliability of the electricity grid during extreme weather events."
In this talk, Yozwiak will discuss her research evaluating the effectiveness of grid hardening in the context of tropical cyclones and Florida, which was the first state to pass grid hardening legislation in 2006. She will discuss her findings in comparing the severity of power outages among Florida border counties, which received grid hardening investments, to their immediate neighbors in Alabama and Georgia, which did not, when experiencing the same magnitude of winds.
Yozwiak studies the intersection of electricity markets, climate change and utility regulation. She is part of Carnegie Mellon's Consortium to Expand Transmission Capacity (ExTx), which studies the legal and regulatory reforms that are needed to unlock the transmission grid's full potential and enable a resilient, decarbonized energy future. She received her bachelor's degree in physics from Yale University and her doctorate in public affairs from Indiana University Bloomington in 2025, where she was a U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a member of the Energy Justice Lab.
About EEEPI
Established in 2011, EEEPI operates as a University-wide initiative at Penn State with support from the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute and the Institute of Energy and the Environment. EEEPI seeks to catalyze research in energy and environmental systems economics across the University and to build a world-class group of economists with interests in interdisciplinary collaboration.
