Texas narrowly avoids blackouts as heat stretches on

Oppressive heat, failing natural gas plants and sluggish winds are driving the Texas grid into emergency territory.

Available supplies are expected to fall to within 400 megawatts of demand by 8 p.m. Thursday — possibly triggering emergency responses.

The state had a close call Wednesday evening, when it hit an electric demand of 82,705 megawatts — the highest of any September in history.

That triggered the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) — to declare emergency measures for the first time since the 2021 ice storms.

This is an automatic step taken whenever state electric demand comes within 1,750 megawatts of outstripping supply and continued to trend downward.

At that level of urgency, the ERCOT tries to cut demand to the bone — largely through voluntary agreements and conservation — throwing all remaining power-generating resources at the grid.

On Wednesday evening, this worked; Texas made it through the bottleneck without rolling blackouts — which ERCOT’s emergency plan calls for if demand doesn’t fall in time. 

The late-season power crunch comes amid a long string of broken records following years of rapidly growing demand. Last summer, the grid hit 11 new all-time peak demand records, eventually topping out at 80,148 megawatts in July.

These numbers have only increased. In 2023, the state has broken a string of 10 all-time records — finally topping out in mid-August at 85,535 megawatts.

ERCOT’s president cast the demand crunch as the result of protracted heat butting up against the daily ebb and flow of renewables production.

“High demand, lower wind generation, and the declining solar generation during sunset led to lower operating reserves on the grid and eventually contributed to lower frequency,” precipitating the emergency declaration, Pablo Vegas, ERCOT president and CEO, said Wednesday.

The high temperatures have suppressed wind speeds, and with heat lasting late into the night — rather than, as was once common in the state, dropping off when it gets dark — electric demand is staying high even as evening cuts production from the state’s rapidly growing solar sector.

The state’s plan to maintain its grid largely rests on the construction of a new fleet of fossil fuel-burning power plants.

In late August, a “high level of unexpected” outages at fossil fuel power plants drove ERCOT to demand conservation measures.

In part this is another symptom of the heat, an Austin Energy representative told local TV station KVUE.

More than 11,000 megawatts of gas and coal generation are offline, according to the ERCOT.

In part, this is attrition and bad timing. Power plants usually are taken offline for maintenance in the offseason — which, with a hot spring and endless summer, stubbornly refuses to come.

But the thermal outages are also simply another factor of the heat that they are helping to worsen.

“These are machines that have so many different moving parts. The heat creates a difficult situation, especially these 107- [and] 105-degree days,” the representative told KVUE.