09/26/2026
Energy demand blasted records this
summer
But Texas’ power grid barely broke a sweat, ERCOT
says
Solar power has more than doubled its contribution to the Texas grid during
peak conditions over the past three years.
Texas's grid repeatedly broke demand records this summer.
Experts attributed the strength of Texas's grid in 2026 to growth in solar
and battery facilities.
BY NATHANIEL ROSENBERG
STAFF WRITER
On the evening of July 21, millions of
Texans arrived home from work and flipped
on their lights and air conditioning.
Quietly, they broke a record. The state’s
energy grid eclipsed its previous peak
demand of 85.5 gigawatts, set back in
August 2023.
The grid shattered the old record again the
next day, with a new top mark of 91.1
gigawatts, according to data from the
Electric Reliability Council of Texas, a
nonprofit that oversees the state’s grid. ERCOT estimates that one gigawatt
can power approximately 250,000 households at the peak of summer.
can power approximately 250,000 households at the peak of summer.
As the summer continued, the grid repeatedly soared past its old demand
record, for days and then weeks at a time. On Aug. 20, amid the first 100-
degree day of the year in Houston, the grid ran above its 2023 benchmark
from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. — seven hours straight.
By mid-September, as temperatures and demand began to cool, Texas’s grid
had surpassed its 2023 usage peak on 45 separate days, including for three
consecutive weeks in August.
In ERCOT’s Coast weather zone, which includes the Houston metro area, the
grid also eclipsed its 2023 record twice, on July 22 and Aug. 26, with the latter
reaching the region’s new demand record at 24.2 gigawatts.
“If you model the grid, we saw this coming, but it’s still pretty wild to see,”
Joshua Rhodes, an energy research scientist at the University of Texas at
Austin, said.
More striking than the record-setting numbers was how little changed for the
state’s residents.
In 2023, historic heatwaves stretched the state’s energy infrastructure to its
limit, setting grid records. That summer, ERCOT issued nearly a dozen
warnings asking Texans to conserve electricity, and even declared a brief grid
emergency for the first time since the historic statewide February 2021 freeze.
In 2026, none of that happened. Not a single conservation request was issued,
and energy reserves comfortably exceeded demand.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the lack of stress was at the hour with the
highest energy demand in the Texas grid’s 85-year history — 6 p.m. on July
22 — there was so much reserve generation that batteries connected to the
grid were able to charge, instead of providing energy.
“Routinely, we are operating at demand levels that would have been
exceptional just a few years ago,” Pablo Vegas, ERCOT’s CEO, told the
nonprofit’s board last week. “For customers, the grid simply worked the way
it was supposed to.”
Amidst a record-setting and widespread concern about projections of
skyrocketing energy demand driven by data centers, the Chronicle spoke to
more than half a dozen grid experts — from top researchers to current and
former grid officials and key figures in the energy market — to try to
understand why Texas’s notoriously unreliable grid had a remarkably reliable
summer.
summer.
The answer was unanimous: solar panels and batteries.
Solar, battery boom
The solar buildout in Texas isn’t new.
But it has dramatically accelerated in Texas since about 2019, when it
surpassed wind as the cheapest energy source to build en masse, according to
Jay Zarnikau, a former Public Utility Commission official and retired energy
researcher from UT Austin.
“The big story for the last few years has been solar energy and battery energy
storage,” Zarnikau said. “I think the growth in supply has exceeded the
growth in demand.”
Since 2023, Texas has added 19.5 gigawatts of new solar arrays to its grid’s
capacity, enough to power 4.8 million homes, according to ERCOT. Over that
same time frame, wind has added 2.5 gigawatts, and natural gas has stayed
virtually flat.
In the peak months of 2023, solar contributed roughly 7.5% of all energy
generation. During the peak months of this summer, solar’s share of Texas
energy production had more than doubled, to just over 18%.
Battery storage, which grew by 16 gigawatts since 2023, more than
quadrupling, also played a crucial role in the smooth summer, Zarnikau said.
That’s because batteries can charge themselves on the grid during the day,
when the sun provides plenty of excess energy, and then be deployed in the
evenings, when demand rises as the sun sets
That strategic deployment of battery reserves also helps consumers save on
electricity costs, Jason Wells, the CEO of Houston-area utility CenterPoint
Energy, observed during a panel at Houston’s annual Energy & Climate Week
last Wednesday.
“This pe*******on of solar and batteries, it helps dampen the prices,” Wells
said. “It’s a real success story.”
The batteries mean ERCOT has to bring fewer natural gas plants — which cost
more than renewables or batteries — online during that crucial evening
demand surge, Wells explained.
But batteries alone still aren’t enough. Most of the battery arrays deployed
across Texas don’t hold more than two hours of storage, Rhodes said. Natural
gas plants still generate more energy for the grid than renewables, and also
gas plants still generate more energy for the grid than renewables, and also
offer around-the-clock dependability that solar and wind lack.
“Different stakeholders like to plant their flags for the different generation
resources, but I say it’s everything.” Bill Flores, the chair of ERCOT’s board of
directors, said. “Texas is an all-of-the-above state.”
A stormy future
While this summer was smooth, industry executives and academics agree
there is no guarantee future summers will be as easy.
Major pressures are bearing down on the Texas energy grid; chief among
those is the question of data centers, which experts project could add between
50 and several hundred gigawatts of new demand to the state’s grid by the
end of the decade.
In the Houston area alone, Wells said at his climate summit talk that roughly
14 gigawatts of new data centers were under construction and they are set to
come online by 2030.
That’s up from the 10 gigawatts he projected in April 2025, though at that
time Wells said that was a “conservative forecast.” If the planned 14
gigawatts of data-center capacity is built, it would amount to a nearly 60%
increase in the Houston area’s current 24.2-gigawatt peak demand.
In his remarks to the ERCOT board last week, Vegas alluded to “challenges
ahead” for the grid operator, as ERCOT attempts to navigate surging demand
from data centers and other large projects.
Under political pressure, Gov. Greg Abbott has also moved to curtail data
center development in the state, calling for an audit of all data center projects
last month, and issuing a moratorium on new permits this week.
“Simply put, Texans must come first,” Abbott said in a statement. “Data
centers must pay their own way, protect our grid and water.”
