As temperatures in Texas rose past 100°F this week, grid operator the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) experienced massive demand and saw new records for electric demand and battery deployments.
On Tuesday, ERCOT recorded 87,403 megawatts (MW) of demand, easily surpassing its previous record of 85,508 MW set during another heat wave in August 2023. On Wednesday, ERCOT saw its grid load increase to 91,308 MW, per gridstatus.io.
ERCOT broke several other new records this week. Maximum net load hit 75,733 MW; maximum total energy storage discharging hit 11,980.34 MW; maximum solar production hit 34,665 MW. Notably, ERCOT also hasn’t issued any requests for its customers to reduce energy use, as its massive stockpile of batteries, renewables, and gas generation has combined to answer the call reliably and without incident.
Earlier this year, the grid operator predicted demand could surpass 92 GW this summer due to high temperatures and new loads from sources such as data centers. To help bolster reliability, ERCOT had already introduced roughly 11 GW to the grid in the few months before making that prediction.
The risk of a grid emergency this summer remains low in ERCOT’s eyes. The grid operator had predicted a 0.09% chance of a grid emergency in June, a 0.21% chance in July, a 5.96% chance in August, and a 4.38% chance in September, with an even lower chance for blackouts in those periods, Community Impact reports.
Texas has seen a massive increase in renewables and battery storage on its system since the 2021 grid failure during Winter Storm Uri. The state now boasts 53,568 MWdc of installed solar and 29,163 MWh of storage capacity, with a projected growth of 39,053 MW over the next five years, per the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). The state is the fastest-growing market for solar, storage, and solar manufacturing.
As demand continues to grow in Texas, ERCOT is also taking steps to alleviate its 438,000 MW queue of large load requests. The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) recently approved ERCOT’s Batch Zero process for large-user connection requests, which ERCOT says is meant to ensure large electricity users like data centers “only connect in quantities and locations the Texas grid can reliably support.”
ERCOT is the first Independent System Operator (ISO) in the nation to use a batch process to assess large electricity users wanting to connect to the grid. The new batch framework groups qualified large projects that are 75 megawatts (MW) and greater into a single study. ERCOT says this process will allow it to assess the “full picture” of future electricity demand at once, allocate available grid capacity, and identify needed transmission upgrades. The batch framework eliminates a previous project-by-project evaluation that ERCOT argues had become “lengthy and repetitive” as large electricity users rushed to connect to the grid.
ERCOT is tracking more than 438,000 MW of large load requests, nearly 89% from data centers alone. “Batch Zero” is the name of the first group of large-user applicants to go through the new process.
