AUSTIN, Texas —
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, is getting ready for summer.
KVUE’s Jenni Lee sat down with ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas to discuss what’s being done to ensure grid reliability.
Last summer, the state grid operator set 10 new all-time peak demand records, with the highest in August at more than 85,000 megawatts. Since then, Vegas said ERCOT has focused on more time for maintenance outages, clear communications and an increase of supply resources that put the state grid operator in a better position to handle increased demand.
"Over 9,000 megawatts of new power supply resources have connected since last summer. And so, what that looks like [is] we've got over 5000 megawatts of solar, new solar that's come on the grid. That's going to be very helpful for the summer peaks. We've got over 1,000 megawatts of new wind and about 3,000 megawatts of dispatchable, which includes both batteries and some gas resources as well,” Vegas said.
ERCOT considers one megawatt enough power to run about 200 homes.
As Texans live through hotter summers and colder winters, Vegas also said ERCOT is factoring for the extremes with advanced forecasting tools that include artificial intelligence (AI).
"AI is starting to present itself as an incredibly powerful tool that can do very advanced and complex calculations very quickly and can help support the human resources that are in the control room [with] making decisions based on what's happening in real-time,” Vegas said.
Vegas said innovation plus more communications and planning for a new era are crucial as the grid continues to face change and growth.
Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 left millions of Texans without power and water for days as record-low temperatures overwhelmed the electric power grid. At least 282 people died.
Vegas said there have been significant changes over the last three years that have improved the reliability and the resiliency of the grid. He pointed to the implementation of weatherization rules and weatherization inspections. A new set of rules was passed after 2022 that was more stringent and required more weatherization to lower temperature standards than the prior set of rules had.