In the over three years since Winter Storm Uri, there’s been far more attention paid to and media coverage of Texas’ oft-precarious electric grid. Highly contentious debates have raged around how to regulate power generators, address soaring demand, and, most basically, keep the lights, ACs, and furnaces on.
But I think a lot of this load is speculative. I think the 152 is probably higher than what we’re actually going to see. I do think a steady rise of 5 gigs a year and maybe even higher than that is possible. But I think we need to take some of those projections with a little bit of a grain of salt. And something like AI data centers, it seems to me, would be something you would want in your state or your region or country. It just seems that it goes very much against the kind of Texas ethos that has been around for a while, for better or worse—“open for business,” right? It’s like, well, open for business, but not for AI data centers. That really struck me as a pretty major change in tone.
A lot of that, most of that is solar and storage. So you bring lots of solar and storage into the system. And then there are various large loads that are coming that have some ability to reduce their use during the .And when I say, “We don’t have enough,” or, “We can’t build out a system fast enough,” what I’m talking about to be clear is a few hundred hours. There’s 8,760 hours in a year. Well, what we are really talking about is a hundred, 200, maybe in a really extreme year 400 or 600 hours .
It wasn’t a situation where we didn’t have enough capacity. We did. We couldn’t move it where it needed to go, or ERCOT decided not to move it where it needed to go. So that is a risk. I don’t think it’s a risk that’s being talked about enough. There, I think the PUC and ERCOT have done a pretty decent job, and you have evidence to support that during Winter Storm Heather compared to Winter Storm Elliot in December 2022. Those were similar events as far as the temperature. And we had pretty poor performance of thermal power plants during Elliott and much better during Heather.