TARRANT COUNTY, Texas — As temperatures rose heading into the weekend, The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) put out a warning.
On Friday, ERCOT announced “possible future Emergency Condition of reserve capacity deficiency” beginning May 8 through May 10. In a statement to WFAA, an ERCOT spokesperson said the grid has sufficient supply to meet demand and that it wasn’t asking Texans to conserve power.
Doug Lewin, President of Stoic Energy and writer for the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter said ERCOT is likely taking precaution before the summer months.
“A lot of gas and coal plants, they go down for plant maintenance. This is the season when they do that, cause they don’t expect very high demand,” Lewin said. “When they do get high demand, you have a lot of coal plants offline, and that could cause some problems.”
Just two days earlier, officials with ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission (PUC) announced concern the power grid could face outages this summer.
“I would be very surprised if there actually was a problem,” Lewin said. “The only way I think there would be a problem is next week, if it’s much hotter than what they’re expecting and demand ends up being much higher than what they’re forecasting.”
PUC Chairman Peter Lake and ERCOT President and CEO Pablo Vegas announced peak demand for electricity this summer will exceed the amount they can generate. The grid will rely on renewable energy to keep the lights on for Texans, Lake said.
“On the hottest days of summer, there is no longer enough on-demand dispatchable power generation to meet demand in the ERCOT system,” Lake said.
Lake and Vegas blamed rapid population growth in Texas for the grid’s supply and demand issues.
During the press conference, Lake said between 2008 and 2022, on-demand dispatchable power supply in Texas grew only 1.5%, and in that same time frame, the state’s population grew 24%.
Vegas said they plan to operate a reliable grid this summer, and that the grid is more stabilized than ever.
“They said that almost in the same breath they were saying everybody should be concerned, that there’s a higher likelihood of outages this summer than last summer,” Lewin said. “They’re confusing people.”