Solar and Storage “Helped Make Summer Uneventful”: Texas Grid Roundup #78
Key takeaways from ERCOT Board meeting charts and graphs, including high thermal outages; low ancillary service prices; growth of solar, storage, and gas; rapidly rising demand AND supply.
I published two recent Grid Roundups (here and here) with content from the Board presentations and hosted a chat during yesterday’s meeting.
Below is additional information from ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas’ presentation and the Summer 2025 Operational and Market Review.
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Key takeaways from presentations to the ERCOT Board:
Forced outages of gas and coal plants were 50-100% higher on a majority of days in July and August this summer compared to 2024.
Solar and a “higher discharge of Energy Storage Resources (ESRs)” filled most of the gap.
Summer 2025 was in the top third for hottest summers in recorded history but far less hot than 2024 or 2023. Milder temperatures “paired with solar growth outpacing large load additions helped make the daytime hours this summer uneventful.”
Solar growth was about 7 gigawatts year-over-year.
Real-time prices “were slightly higher than summer 2024 due to higher natural gas prices” but ancillary service costs were down significantly …
… mostly due to batteries.
“With increasing ESR capacity on the system, they continue to dominate Ancillary Service awards, especially for regulation services. The most notable increase from summer 2024 is in Non-Spin. The net effect is downward pressure on Ancillary Service prices.” (emphasis added)
Electricity consumption is up more than 5% annually in the last four years — double the growth rate of the previous decade.
Meanwhile, peak demand is down the last two years despite overall growth of consumption.
The ERCOT market will likely be able to sustain that demand growth because the grid operator expects to synchronize over 6 gigawatts in the first quarter of 2026 – an all-time record for a quarter.
ERCOT has averaged about a gigawatt per month of new supply over the last four years which is more than any other market in America. Q1 2026 is slated to double even that high level of supply additions.
The IMM will make the case that ERCOT is over-procuring long lead time ancillary services like Non-Spin Reserve Service (NSRS). ERCOT staff is asking the Board to approve their 2026 ancillary service methodology but the IMM has proposed a compromise the Monitor say will achieve equal reliability for less cost. This has major implications for the future implementation of Dispatchable Reliability Reserve Service (DRRS) which will likely be a very expensive service, particularly in the first year or two.
Much more in coming days and weeks. Please subscribe, like, and share this post so others can find it. And thanks for reading!