HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — As we kick off another summer here in southeast Texas, many of us are asking the same question we always ask this time of year: “Will our energy grid hold up with increased demand?”
Experts say the concern isn’t so much our highs; it’s our lows.
“The warm mornings are more of a sneaky concern because a lot of people put emphasis on, ‘Oh my gosh, this was such a hot day, temperatures were in the 90s.’ That’s because you started in the mid to upper 70s, so that’s where you begin your day.”
ABC13 meteorologist Elyse Smith said our warm overnight lows are breaking records.
“For us to have mornings starting in the 80s, that is not normal, but it’s becoming more normal as our climate warms,” she said.
“We’re not at risk of blackouts from that,” explained Daniel Cohan, a Rice University Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor, “but it does mean that we’re burning more coal, burning more natural gas than we would otherwise because we don’t have any solar overnight.”
Cohan researches how our atmosphere impacts energy production and policy.
“Texas has moved remarkably fast to its credit. We’ve been adding transmission lines faster than most of the country; we’ve been building out solar farms and battery projects faster than anyone else,” Cohan said. “We’ve recently surpassed California in our amount of solar farms. We’ve always been the leader in wind farms.”
Today, ERCOT data shows more than 30% of the state’s electricity comes from solar alone.
But at night, that obviously drops to zero.
And, it’s not just our changing climate that is now causing concern.
“Looking out a few years, it’s really a wide open question,” he said. “The number of data centers being proposed would dwarf all other demand.”
ERCOT officials are forecasting power demand will set a new record this summer.
The last record was set in 2023, due to that summer’s record heat.
This story comes from our news partner ABC13 Houston.