Scorching heat to push Texas electric demand to record levels next week

Texas is set to face record electric demand next week as it endures punishing tropical heat.

Many Texans remain unsure of whether the state’s grid has been fixed after going through two crises since 2020. But even though the state is anticipated to smash electricity demand records almost every day next week, blackouts are unlikely — at least from demand alone.

Demand on the isolated electric grid is expected to top last year’s all-time highs by more than 3 percent on Monday afternoon, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which administers the grid.

But while overall demand has risen, supply has risen faster as a result of grid efficiency measures and an influx of renewable energy — keeping the Texas grid flush with reserve power. 

Even as demand Monday is estimated to hit 82 gigawatts — beating last summer’s record of about 80 gigawatts — the state will have around 7 gigawatts of additional reserve power, according to ERCOT.

Many Texans are still uncertain as to whether reforms made to the grid are sufficient to stop another deadly blackout, however.

A new poll from the University of Texas at Austin found that 47 percent of Texas voters lacked confidence that state lawmakers had done enough to shore up the grid, and fewer than 20 percent were confident.

“There has been a very long hangover from the impact and the experience of [the 2021] winter storm,” James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, which carried out the grid survey, told Austin-based KXAN. 

That February storm was a statewide shock that resulted when extreme weather hit the state’s insufficiently insulated power infrastructure.

As demand surged from millions of Texans trying to stay warm, the grid came within five minutes of a catastrophic failure that could have taken months to fix. 

But to head off that outcome, ERCOT blacked out much of the grid — leaving 69 percent of Texans without power and 49 percent water for at least some part of the four-day crisis, according to the state.

And an ice storm in February led to widespread and protracted outages in Austin, where at one point a quarter of the city was without power in subfreezing conditions. 

Texans remain doubtful about how much progress has been made since those outages, Henson noted — even though the legislature has twice met to “both make the grid, as it exists, more resilient and to expand capacity,” he added.

But after experiencing two multiday blackouts in three years, there is ample reason for Texans to remain gun-shy — particularly as triple-digit June temperatures are already setting records across several small cities.

Some of these new records are eye-popping, with temperatures in certain areas hitting levels slightly higher than those in Death Valley, Calif., usually America’s benchmark for extreme heat. 

The Rio Grande cities of Del Rio and Laredo each hit 115 degrees this week. In San Angelo, as temperatures reached a record 114, the area’s National Weather Service branch tweeted photos of chocolate chip cookies being baked inside a parked car.

ERCOT this week called on customers to “voluntarily reduce electric use” to blunt the record demand on the grid and to make up for interruptions in the power that usually would have been supplied by wind and gas.

But despite some cities setting new records, temperatures in Texas are in general lower than in previous years, according to ERCOT.

That is thanks in large part to the considerable rains that fell across much of the state in late spring. Water in soil absorbs solar energy that would otherwise drive up air temperatures, and the added moisture held down the heat, the grid operator said. 

So while Texas’s summer resembles many scorching years of the past — notably the sizzling summer 2012 — it isn’t likely to be quite as hot as those seasons on average.

But “not quite as hot” is a relative term, and it’s one that won’t match many Texans’ experience — or the impact of weather on the state power demand.

Meteorologists often measure heat using the “heat index,” which measures how hot an area feels by combining humidity with temperature.

That number reflects the added heating power — what climate scientists call the “forcing” — of wet air as opposed to dry.

And in heat index terms, there is nothing cool about this summer at all. Austin, for example, hit a heat index record of 118 on Wednesday afternoon.

Heat waves like the one currently hitting Texas have become three to five times more likely due to the impacts of climate change from the protracted burning of fossil fuels, according to The Washington Post.

The increase in the state’s average temperatures resulting from climate change is driving the state’s normally oppressive summers to new extremes, state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told the Texas Tribune.

“Texas is running about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it did during the 20th century,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “So if you’re close to a temperature record, that will put it over the edge.”

The cause of that rise is now almost universally agreed to be the continued burning of carbon fuels — which, in a brutal bit of climate irony, remain the most reliable source of on-demand power to shore up grids pinched by planetary heating. 

As ERCOT records note, Texas has made more progress than most states in replacing carbon fuels with zero-carbon ones. About 40 percent of the state’s electric supply is now zero-carbon: 18 percent comes from solar, 13 percent from wind and 7.5 percent from nuclear.

Renewable resources are now essential to keeping the grid stable, a leading Texas regulator told reporters in May.

“For the first time, the peak demand for power this summer will exceed the amount we can generate from dispatchable power, and we will be relying on renewables to keep the lights on,” said Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission.

But state Republicans have consistently criticized renewables as inherently unreliable and have often suggested adding renewables — such as wind and solar — to the grid makes it less stable. 

The state GOP passed legislation in May to build 10 more power plants that would run on planet-heating natural gas, which currently supplies about 48 percent of Texas’s electric supply. Coal, the dirtiest-burning fuel, accounts for the final 13.5 percent.