MANY MINDEDTexas set a demand record of 91.1 GW, and solar carried a third of the peak hour
Hourly peak load on the Texas grid reached a record 91.1 GW on July 22 during a heat wave, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The previous high was 85.5 GW in August 2023, so this is a 6% increase. At the 6pm peak, natural gas supplied 48% of the load and solar 32%. The Southwest Power Pool set its own record of 57.9 GW five days later.
The number that carries the story is 32%. Evening peaks have historically been the argument against solar — the load arrives as the sun goes down, so the resource is said to be absent exactly when it is needed. On the hottest hour of the year on the largest grid of its kind in the United States, roughly a third of the electricity came from panels. The EIA account records no conservation appeal and no emergency, which is the other half: the grid did not merely survive record demand, it met it without asking anyone to stop using power.
This is the ENERGY pillar working as designed. Cheap generation is only worth what the grid can actually deliver at the moment of need, and a record served without an appeal is a better datapoint than a record capacity figure.
The caveat is what the source does not cover: it says nothing about the contribution of batteries, which is the resource that would explain how the hours after 6pm were handled. And record demand is not by itself good news — read alongside today's card on ERCOT pausing large-load interconnections, this is a grid meeting its peaks and simultaneously refusing new connections.
Source: EIA