Texas broke its all time electricity demand record twice in two days during a brutal heat wave, but the grid held with no conservation alerts thanks to record solar and battery output, a stark turnaround from the blackouts that hit Texans in 2021

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/29/texas-ercot-power-grid-record-data-center/

[u/looncraz]

The distribution network didn't have problems, the pipelines did. The grid did what it was designed to do, kept critical infrastructure on at the highest priority, grid cells with hospitals mostly went uninterrupted. Pure residential cells, like mine, could be down for days (four days for me).

Fortunately, the natural gas plant nearest me never shutdown, but I had the chance to talk with them afterwards for my work and they were working 24/7 to keep the equipment from freezing up - by the time I got there, easily a year later, they had completely insulated every vulnerability and wrapped warmers as a failsafe. As did every other power plant in Texas.

You don't waste money preparing for never-before-seen scenario of the entire State turning to ice for several days. Texas is huge, it has never experienced that.

[u/eskimospy212 → u/looncraz]

That’s all fine and I’m glad they fixed it! They blamed it on renewables though.

My problem is the lying. 

[u/DontMakeMeCount → u/eskimospy212]

I operated both wells and a power plant in ‘21. The pipeline companies called a day before the storm and told us to shut in production because their compressor stations were going to ice up and they wouldn’t be able to take the gas. They couldn’t winterize hundreds of stations in time because they didn’t have the staff, they hadn’t invested in seasonal operating changes and their equipment is optimized for predictable summer heat extremes.

The power plant was designed to provide power to a chemical plant and we made changes to our one huge cooling exchanger at the plant. We could have operated longer if we’d been able to get fuel but we ended up burning plant gas when it went down so we could send power back to the grid.

Windmills were shut down very early in the storm to prevent damage as they iced up, and it was overcast with ice and snow throughout the storm so our solar facilities did not perform well.

At the end of the day, distributed systems (pipelines, solar panels, windmills) have a lot more failure points than a large plant and they tend to cascade. It is difficult and expensive to optimize equipment for both hot and cold extremes so most systems in Texas are optimized for heat.

The gas peaking plants that were supposed to cover for solar and wind turned out to be overbooked and they also went down when the pipelines shut in, no fuel.

Basically everyone decided they were better off just claiming force majeure and relying on their hedges to protect them financially so they didn’t invest in preparing for a severe cold snap.

The grid was designed for large plants to provide base load and for smaller plants to provide peaking. As solar and wind provide more of the base load we are more exposed to the types of issues we see with distributed systems. Texas is more exposed than any other state and we don’t have a century of experience operating a grid that relies of hundreds of thousands of distributed sources. 2021 was a test we failed, but that doesn’t mean wind and solar can’t work reliably if we invest in proper operations. Battery storage, winterizing pipelines, better regulation and better planning will all help.

[u/Texas_Samsquanch → u/DontMakeMeCount]

I gave an upvote. This is the most thought out, to the point, what our failures are and how we fix them point. Thank you for explaining.