From 1980 through 2024, the United States averaged 9 weather and climate disasters per year, each causing at least $1 billion in damage. Over the most recent five years, that average jumped to 23. The country is not facing the same weather it built its infrastructure to handle.
A new National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, released May 19, 2026, argues that the way to absorb the coming climate shocks is to stop treating energy and water as separate research problems. The report was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy to guide a proposed Regional Energy–Water Technology Pilot program and makes the case that severe weather, aging infrastructure, electrification, and the explosive growth of data centers have pushed the two systems to a point where failures in one cascade into the other.
Coordinated research across the water and energy infrastructure, the researchers say, is essential for reliability.
How Severe Weather Couples Two Systems Into One Failure Mode
Energy depends on water, and water depends on energy. While this sounds simple, the report shows that the connection between them has become fragile in reality.
Power plants use water for cooling. Hydropower releases water to make electricity. Drinking water systems need electricity to pump, treat, and pressurize water. Wastewater plants also need electricity to prevent pollution in rivers and bays. If any of these links break under stress, the problem spreads to the other systems.
The committee points to Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 as a key example. When ERCOT’s grid failed in Texas, it did more than leave millions without power. It also shut down water treatment and distribution, resulting in boil-water notices for millions of Texans, and left some communities without safe water for days. The report says events like this are likely to happen more often.
The mechanisms behind that expectation are documented across the rest of the report:
- Thermal power vulnerability. From 2000 through 2015, 43 U.S. power plants reported shutdowns due to high water temperatures, most occurring during summer heat waves, drought, or both. Nuclear plants accounted for 25 of those shutdowns.
- Future capacity losses. Modeling cited in the report projects that future water availability and rising temperatures will decrease U.S. national thermoelectric power capacity by an average of 2.5 percent, with individual plant impacts ranging from a 31 percent decrease to a 6 percent increase, depending on location.
- Saltwater intrusion. In South Florida, sea-level rise combined with groundwater pumping is pushing saltwater into freshwater aquifers, forcing the use of energy-intensive reverse osmosis to produce drinking water. The climate impact becomes a permanent energy cost.
- Wildfire feedback loops. Wind-driven contact between vegetation and overhead power lines sparks wildfires. Utilities respond with public safety power shutoffs. The shutoffs strain water systems that need electricity to maintain pressure. Firefighting depletes reservoirs. After the fire, runoff carrying combustion byproducts and damaged pipe materials degrades water quality for months.
- Compound drought and heat. Drought and extreme heat now co-occur more often, simultaneously raising electricity demand for cooling and reducing water available for thermoelectric generation and hydropower. Each stress amplifies the other.
What the Report Recommends
The committee’s main recommendation is for the Department of Energy to create a group of regional pilot projects. Instead of single demonstrations, these would be coordinated investments to test how integrated energy–water solutions work in different parts of the country. For example, drought in the Southwest is very different from flooding in the Gulf Coast or grid failures during cold weather in the Plains.
Two recommendations focus on preparing for severe weather. Recommendation 2-3 says pilot projects should clearly consider the effects of possible extreme events. Recommendation 2-5 goes further by asking DOE to make proactive risk management at the energy–water intersection a main goal of the program. This includes investing in risk assessment, scenario planning, and early warning tools.
The committee is clear about what is at risk. Without careful scenario planning and investment in coordinated solutions, the report says that cascading failures will increasingly threaten economic stability, public health, environmental protection, and national security.
Why This Recommendation Is Vulnerable Right Now
The proposed pilot program falls under DOE’s Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office, which was renamed from the Water Power Technologies Office in early 2026 and reorganized into the new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. The office’s framing under the current administration emphasizes affordability, reliability, and energy dominance rather than climate adaptation.
This approach brings both an opportunity and a risk. The opportunity is that an energy–water pilot program can be supported for its reliability and economic benefits, without needing to rely on climate-change arguments to gain political support. The risk is that the climate-related research priorities identified by the National Academies committee could be left out of the program if no one outside DOE advocates for them.
The NOAA billion-dollar disasters database, which provided key evidence for the report, was discontinued in May 2025. Climate Central now manages the dataset, but losing the federal version shows how fragile the data infrastructure has become.
It is difficult for research recommendations to carry their full weight when the supporting evidence is being defunded.
What You Can Do
Right now, public pressure on Congress and industry trade groups can influence whether the pilot program is funded, designed effectively, and focused on the climate-related risks described in the report. Here are some concrete actions, listed from most to least impactful:
Contact Your Members of Congress
- Find your representatives. Use house.gov to find your House member by ZIP code, and senate.gov for your two senators.
- Request three specific actions: full funding for the DOE Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office’s regional energy–water pilot program in the next fiscal year; clear language in the appropriations report that directs the program to include the National Academies report’s Recommendations 2-3 and 2-5 on extreme-event risk; and restoration of federal funding for the NOAA billion-dollar disaster tracking and the climate and infrastructure data programs that researchers, utilities, and insurers rely on.
- Make your message local. Members of Congress pay more attention to issues that affect their constituents directly. Mention the energy and water utilities in your area, recent disasters your region has faced, and the local economic impacts. A letter specific to your district is more effective than a general petition.
- Target the relevant Congressional committees. If your member sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, or either chamber’s Appropriations Committee Energy and Water Development subcommittee, your contact carries extra weight.
Engage Industry Where It Already Has Standing
The report often points out that professional associations are some of the most trusted ways to move energy–water research from policy into real-world practice. Members of these groups can advocate for change from within.
- If you work in or with a water utility, ask whether your utility is engaging with the American Water Works Association’s Water 2050 initiative and its sustainability and resilience strategic priority. Urge utility leadership to file public comment in support of the DOE pilot program through AWWA’s federal advocacy channels.
- If you work in or with an electric utility, groups like the Edison Electric Institute, American Public Power Association, and National Rural Electric Cooperative Association all have federal advocacy programs. Supporting coordinated energy–water research matches their members’ interests in reliability and stable rates, especially as data centers increase demand.
- If you are a utility customer, remember that public utility commissions and city councils decide water and electric rates and approve investments in resilience. Speaking up at resource planning hearings is one of the few times residents can directly influence how utilities prepare for severe weather. Support the Research and Data Infrastructure
- Defend the data. Climate Central’s takeover of the billion-dollar disasters database is useful but does not substitute for the federal data infrastructure that utilities, insurers, and grid operators depend on. Write to your representatives in support of restoring NOAA’s climate and weather data programs in the next appropriations cycle.
- Use and reference the report. The National Academies report is free to download. If you work in planning, journalism, policy, or research, its approach to viewing energy-sheds alongside watersheds offers a helpful perspective that can influence local decisions.
- Pay attention to your state’s utility regulators. State public utility commissions are now key places where decisions about resilience investments for extreme events are made. Their meetings are open to the public, their decisions depend on public comments, and they often do not get the attention they deserve considering the money they manage.
The National Academies committee chose its words carefully when talking about climate change. While the word climate appears often, the report focuses on risk, extreme events, changing conditions, and resilience in uncertain times. No matter what language is used in future funding debates, the facts remain: heat waves and droughts are happening more often and together, hurricanes are getting stronger faster, wildfires are starting earlier and burning larger, and the country’s energy and water infrastructure was built for a climate that is now gone.
The report is valuable because it goes beyond just describing the problem. It offers a specific federal solution: a regional pilot program at DOE that can help close the gap. Whether this program is created as the committee intended will partly depend on how many people push for it.