Austin News

Hot and dry weather in Texas is expected to lead to record-breaking demands on the state’s electric grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) predicted recently, leaving some analysts concerned about continued power outages after the state suffered interruptions last winter.

While the current record peak demand is 74,820 megawatts set in August 2019, the demand is expected to increase to 77,144 MW in the upcoming summer months. It takes one megawatt to power roughly 200 homes in the heating season, according to ERCOT. With a projected 86,862 MW of generation capacity, there should be enough electricity to handle the load but there could be problems if wind generation falls short of projections.

“The forecast is that we’re going to have a hotter than usual summer, and this forecast shows that we don’t have enough power to go around,” Daniel Cohan, a climate scientist and energy analyst at Rice University, told KVUE.

KHOU11 energy analyst Ed Hirs added that he’s “concerned” about what could leave Texans in the dark this summer. 

“I'm very concerned because we've had underinvestment across this grid and underinvestment with generation, underinvestment with transmission,” he told KVUE.

Still, ERCOT has insisted that its report summary proves it will have enough generations to meet the demands.

One caveat to ERCOT's projection of adequate supplies is the intermittency of wind generation. While total installed wind capacity in Texas is more than 25,000 MW, ERCOT is only relying on 6,700 MW of that during peak demand hours during the late summer afternoons, it reports. And if the wind stops blowing at that time, Texas could face problems.

“This report is kind of a split personality,” Hirs added. “On the one hand, it's saying that the odds of us having a blackout are really pretty low, but they don't actually quantify that. Then they give you three scenarios under which there could be blackouts.”

An exploratory system from ERCOT details three intense situations on data collected from 2011, which marked a hot and dry summer. If conditions are similar, the power grid could be 3,614 megawatts short and only 720,000 homes could have power, KVUE reports. If solar power generation is included, it will be 7,500 megawatts short and could provide power to 1.5 million homes. ERCOT's worst-case prediction includes the grid being 14,000 MW short. Should this happen, 2.8 million residents could be without power.