The watch does not indicate the state will see any widespread outages or that ERCOT will call for energy conservation. The watch is only an indication of higher demand on Texas’ power infrastructure than expected.
“Grid conditions are normal when we issue a Weather Watch,” ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said in a statement. “ERCOT continues to monitor conditions closely and will deploy all available tools to manage the grid and will continue our reliability-first approach to operations, always prioritizing grid reliability.”
The weather watch begins Thursday and will continue through June 21.
This is the first time ERCOT has ever issued a so-called weather watch. It is a new communications strategy from the state-regulated nonprofit related to concerns over the resiliency of Texas’ power grid first sparked by the deadly 2021 winter storm.
The Texas power grid, which covers most of the state and is largely isolated from the national grid, could break the all-time demand record Thursday and likely will surpass the record on Friday.
Smashing demand records is becoming a common occurrence. Texas set all-time records for electricity usage 11 times during a heat wave last year.
The current record of 80,148 megawatts was set on July 20. But Friday could see peak demand in the neighborhood of 82,000 megawatts, according to ERCOT projections.
That would be near what the Electric Reliability Council of Texas projected in a seasonal report would be peak summer demand this year. That report also indicated Texas would see brownouts amid the most extreme situations.
Climate change and Texas’ growing population have led to increases in Texans’ use of electricity. It is getting hotter earlier in the year, and Texans are finding more things to plug into the grid as well, such as electrical vehicles, energy consultant Doug Lewin said.
Lewin said residents should not be worried. ERCOT’s projections show a healthy amount of reserves. A slightly elevated amount of fossil fuel power plants are experiencing outages and renewable output should be high in the coming days.
Demand is “shockingly high for this early, but it is not out of the realm of what was expected this summer,” he said.
In the 2021 winter storm, ERCOT shut off power to nearly half of Texas households as cascading infrastructure failures brought the grid to the brink of collapse. The blackouts led to the deaths of at least 246 Texans.
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