The Texas electric grid could experience a new all-time peak demand this summer thanks to a combination of hotter temperatures and growing number of large electricity users, like data centers.

Despite this, ERCOT officials said there’s a low risk of a grid emergency.

This summer’s peak load is forecasted to climb as high as 92 gigawatts, Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s vice president of system operations, said during a quarterly board meeting last week.

This follows several consecutive summers of peak loads only rising to 84 or 85 gigawatts. The current power demand record is 85.5 gigawatts, set during record-breaking heat in August 2023.

One gigawatt is enough to serve 250,000 residential homes during peak hours, according to ERCOT.

The weather pattern over the next few months is even more uncertain than usual because of El Niño, Woodfin said, but ERCOT is prepared for a hot summer with temperatures comparable to 2023.

ERCOT reports forecasted chances needed to initiate rotating outages as 0.04% in June and 0.11% in July. Those chances rise during the evening hours, when temperatures remain high but solar generation decreases. Wind generation, natural gas power plants and battery storage typically fill the gap but this risk forecast takes the possibility of low wind and fixed battery capacity into consideration.

A new addition to ERCOT’s toolkit for avoiding power grid emergencies is the legal authority to shut off power to large consumers, like data centers and cryptocurrency miners, when curtailment is needed. This power was given to the agency when Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 6 last year.

While discussing the summer forecast, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas highlighted energy capacity that’s been added to the grid in about a year.

The grid gained nearly 11 gigawatts of new capacity since last summer, the majority from battery storage and solar, which have driven most of the additions on the grid the last few years. 

Also notable was the growing amount of combined natural gas and diesel, Vegas said, which added 1.5 GW since last year. Most of that capacity — 900 megawatts of natural gas — is from Texas Energy Fund projects.

This is a change from last summer when the grid experienced a natural gas net loss of 366 MW.

“We haven’t seen a number of this size with an annual change in quite a few years,” Vegas said.

This reporting is part of the Future of North Texas, a community-funded journalism initiative supported by the Commit Partnership, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Lisa and Charles Siegel, the McCune-Losinger Family Fund, The Meadows Foundation, the Perot Foundation, the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas. The News retains full editorial control of this coverage.