The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s electric grid operator, issued an emergency declaration this week as stubbornly high temperatures pushed power demand perilously close to supply levels.
Throughout the summer, Texas residents have received close to a dozen conservation requests from ERCOT over concerns about supply meeting demand. Texas Tribune managing editor Matthew Watkins notes that this week marked a significant escalation as the state entered emergency operations, coming dangerously close to experiencing rolling blackouts.
It was the biggest emergency for the grid since the 2021 winter blackout.
Watkins notes the outage came in the evening when solar power died down, “but there were also some concerns about transmission, where a lot of wind energy was being picked up in South Texas, but ERCOT was having trouble moving it up the state to elsewhere in the grid.”
For more stories from the week in Texas politics, listen to our Q&A in the audio player above.
