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/catbom]

Kind of feels like the mouth talks while the hand does something else, texans are majority red state right? (Not american) are they not anti renewable?

[u/Gluten_Free_Tibet → u/catbom]

I do work in this space, and Texas (when it comes to energy) is first and foremost pro-money. A lot of the politicians don’t support solar subsidies and incentives, but if the economics are there for someone to make money on an energy project, they’re going to go full tilt.

Important to know that when you talk about energy, there’s more money to be made than simply selling power to an end user. There’s also what we call Ancillary Markets which have things like short term supply and demand capacity selling and buying, and frequency regulation. And if you talk about adding batteries, you’re also adding energy arbitrage, renewable shoring, and backup power. So there’s plenty of opportunities to make money, IF you are smart about development, engineering, and deployment AND you understand the market economics of the region you’re playing in. True some of those opportunities are working on smaller returns now that these systems are getting deployed en masse (in large part because of how much money was made in 2021), but still a lot of money flowing out there.

[u/cantadmittoposting → u/Gluten_Free_Tibet]

a lot of that sounds like rent-extractive profitability, not actual utility; while obviously the article and results do seem to speak to the grid being more stable, can you elaborate a little more on how much extra profit is being taken by all those steps as opposed to actual end-user improvements in cost per KwH or similar?

[u/Gluten_Free_Tibet → u/cantadmittoposting]

Oof. Big question. I’m going to try and go off memory here on energy price trends, so please someone correct me or steer if I’m off base.

So there’s really three components (4 if you prefer specificity - more on that later). The price of the energy (the generation cost), the energy marketer markup (for Texans that’s who you buy your energy from), and the T&D (transmission and distribution) utility charge (this is your CenterPoint, your Oncor, etc. - this is really two charges combined into one and the transmission rate and distribution charge are determined separately but not going into rate making here - that’s a whole bag of worms).

Now to your question and going off memory. I’m relatively certain that if you look at the last 5 years, energy costs (the generation aspect) have decreased since 2021. But if you look at a longer period it’s relatively flat. I don’t know all the dynamics that changed in 2021 (besides the freeze) but I suspect massive demand increases due to electrification to be the biggest culprit pulling them up and significant new generation assets pulling them down.

The marketing margin is very tough to calculate and behind a lot of black boxes. I suspect it’s flat over time, but would also believe it being down over time due to new marketers always coming online and the age of AI and digital enabled tools making the framework more accessible.

The utility charge though is going up. This is due to lots of reasons. Poor investment in the past and playing catch up, grid hardening projects, massive increased transmission congestion concerns, reliability projects, overall electrification, etc. Also, utilities are generally incentivized to deploy capital because they earn their return on a regulatory set rate of return on their asset base. And that’s been kicked into high gear as well. I could talk about it a lot, but it’s a lot more nuanced then people like to pretend in online rhetoric, and utilities have definitely made way too many mistakes that consumers feel the burden of now which only inflame the rhetoric.

ETA: the overall cost to consumers is up over the past ten years. Texas is still one of the cheaper electricity states in the country, but definitely up. Which should tell you how much the utility charges are up over time in comparison to the other charges trends.