Texas electricity maximum renewables record | Hacker News Reader

Texas electricity maximum renewables record

gridstatus.io

37 pointsmartinpw57 comments

Texas also has installed large amounts of battery capacity, often providing over 5% of the total grid power during sunset hours

If I'm reading this graph correctly, it looks like they were hitting up to 5% last year and are hitting up to 10% this year - that's an incredible rate of growth:

https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Bat...

This site does grid mix too:

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2025-06-17

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards

Getting this on the link and their homepage. Maybe AI bot blocking? Normal NON Tor or VPN.

If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT Service Desk at ServiceDesk@ercot.com.

Same from clean residential IP. They must assume a DDOS attack with the HN crowd suddenly clicking on that link ^^

They geoblock non US IPs at a WAF.

Today is definitely sunny and windy.

With power prices negative, I guess those big Bitcoin mines out in West TX are quite profitable burning off our excess power...

> West TX

FYI, there actually is a city called West, so it would usually appear as "West, TX" or West TX". It's actually between Dallas and Austin though and not in the west.

I assume you're just correcting capitalization, but for clarity's sake, the aforementioned Bitcoin mines are in west TX, the region with oil derricks, wind turbines, and tumbleweeds, and not West, TX, the town with the Little Czech Stop and delicious kolaches.

I didn’t really mean it as corrective. I just thought it was interesting how subtle differences can completely change, in this case, a location.

El Paso aside, the only place in West Texas I can think of that may have a datacenter is Sul Ross University in Alpine but i doubt it. ..there's probably not even one in El Paso.

Now, if only it was reliable in the winter…

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116690/documents/...

https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-winter-storms-2021...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/climate/texas-blackouts-d... | https://archive.today/FOUK8

https://www.ucs.org/resources/gas-malfunction

Edit:

On base load generation:

https://www.google.com/search?q=base+load+myth

Even if you ignore grid failures, the fact is that power output from renewables drops during the winter. That’s just a fact. That drop must be made up by other things (natural gas, nuclear, or coal, in Texas, very little hydro). I’m all for more renewables, but we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline during certain weather conditions.

Or build more renewables. If that's the cheapest thing to do, of course.

And batteries:

China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million [$63.8 million] and occupying 34k square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt... - April 19th, 2024

Chemical batteries are one possibility. They’re expensive and it’s not clear how reliable they are going to be at scale, but yes, the could help for some periods. There are also capacity limitations. They are probably better for day/night scenarios, not weeks-long weather patterns.

Some of the ideas like using energy to pump water uphill into a reservoir and then generating hydro power when you release it back down into a lower reservoir are interesting in terms of reliability, but they aren’t great for efficiency (hydro generation inefficiency). You can do that without having a natural river, which reduces some of the ecological issues with dams.

Also, that article about China making as many batteries as the world needs is deceiving if we’re talking about grid scale capacity as opposed to house scale or vehicle batteries. If the world went 100% into renewable energy with grid-scale battery deployment to provide extra capacity to make up for renewable generation variation, there’s no way China could keep up. That’s a LOT of batteries and ongoing replacement as they age and fail.

Actually, we're pretty close. Estimates put the number of batteries required for decarbonizing the grid at about 30TWh. China has about 1TWh of annual capacity, with capacity increasing close to 50% per annum. Grid storage battery life is about 20 years.

Interesting. We will see if that pans out as expected. I’m skeptical, but maybe. If so, cool!

Well, then you need some diversity strategy such that you aren’t just building more stuff that also goes offline. And you would need it to be able to flex up in a controlled fashion to make up for losses in other geographies. That’s hard with wind and solar. They don’t flex very well. When things are going well, you get what you get. There’s no way to make the wind blow harder or make the sun shine more brightly when you want it. You need well controlled base load capacity. Of nuclear, gas, and coal, nuclear is clean and basically renewable for all intents and purposes (it’s not, but it might as well be).

I'm sure utilities will build whatever they think is cheapest, whether that be nuclear, excess wind and solar, batteries, or whatever.

Depends on whether they go to zero, or just drop to 50% of normal output. If it's the latter, then it might be cheaper to build twice as much wind as you'd need at optimal times than to build a nuclear plant. You'd need to do the maths for the specific situation.

(And also if they drop to 0% for an occasional hour then you can use batteries. If once every five years they drop to 0% for two weeks then you absolutely need to have something else that can fill that gap.)

Texas is building more grid scale battery storage than any other state:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/chart-us...

This year EIA again expects Texas to outpace California, only now by an even wider margin than last year. The Lone Star State could build nearly 7 GW of utility-scale storage in 2025 compared to California’s 4.2 GW.

Note though that this is largely because Texas uses a crazy amount of energy compared to California. Some due to local climate, some due to lack of efficiency regs, and a lot due to lack of rooftop solar (going back to their weather again). California's record for grid demand served by batteries is 4x the record of Texas. California's renewables-to-load ratio is double Texas's. Again this is significantly due to California having over 5x the rooftop solar of Texas, which lowers grid demand in the daytime.

The Texas grid is deliberately cut off from other states to avoid federal regulation. If we would just interconnect, then you diversify your locations and are much less susceptible to the wild swings in price driven by weather, which in the case of 2021 also impacted natural gas plants.

> just interconnect

Or instead, the federal regulations should obviously be fixed.

They're not broken.

the federal regulations require reasonable things like proper winterization

In Texas doesn't electricity use also drop during the winter? Almost everyone I know in Texas has gas heat and the winters are mild while summers are scorching. I use about 3X the electricity in summer months vs winter. I would guess nearly all residential energy use in Texas follows this pattern.

Yes, it definitely drops, but we’ve had issues where wind was basically offline in west Texas. So, you still need to balance it out.

A lot of newer construction and especially apartment buildings will end up using resistive heating, the least efficient option.

Sadly, getting an HVAC person willing to install a heat pump system in Texas seems to be quite a challenge.

Some of the highest peak energy usages the state has ever seen have been in the winter. For instance, that 2021 winter storm absolutely crushed the records of energy usage in the state before it all crashed, and every year after that has seen even higher amounts of usage in the winter since.

Sadly, getting an HVAC person willing to install a heat pump system in Texas seems to be quite a challenge.

We had a heat pump installed here in central Texas about a year ago. It replaced a heat pump 40+ years old. There are a couple local installers (in Blanco, TX) and I regularly see adds for others in surrounding areas (San Antonio / Austin). It is expensive (I have no idea related to other areas but seemed expensive). It is not hard to get a heat pump around here.

> It is expensive (I have no idea related to other areas but seemed expensive).

That's what I mean. You have to want to pay for someone who is going to upcharge you more for the equipment you want and the cheaper installers won't touch it. So you have to go with the primo installers charging you a lot more for otherwise the same equipment.

Aside from the backup heat requirements, having a central AC installed is already 95% the same equipment. And yet they'll easily charge you 20%+ before even talking about installing extra resistive heat. And from what I've seen (a dozen quotes in North Texas) none of them would install gas as the secondary heat source despite the gas line being right there already. They were all arguing "no, it needs to be resistive electric for the secondary".

I wanted a heat pump. I shopped around for months. The only people willing to do what I wanted (heat pump + gas backup) wanted more than 2.5x the cost of the group I went with that installed ac and a gas furnace.

> but we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline

The problem wasn't the renewables going offline, they dipped in production due to not being winterized, but that was well modelled and they actually outperformed their expected output.

The problem, as mentioned in toomuchtodo's links, was the nuclear and gas plants going offline because they weren't winterized and trying to take the grid down with them. The mix was fine, but the market rewarded the cheapest preparations and the state government didn't step in to intervene.

ERCOT was also load shedding major circuits that fed fossil gas compressor stations (which fed downstream fossil gas generation), leading to a generation death spiral.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41787696 (previous comment I wrote with citations)

i get what you're saying but renewable capacity does not drop during the winter. On the contrary, winter months outside the tropics have higher wind speeds.

Solar output drops during the winter, not wind.

that said, economics pose a major problem to building more renewable energy capacity. No one will build a wind farm if it is not profitable. Profitability is a major question if average electricity prices drop.

Well, it depends on the geography. I’d have to look at output for west Texas and the panhandle. But yea, wind doesn’t necessarily go down. But solar does if for no other reason than angle of incidence in the winter.

> we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline during certain weather conditions

If you want something to compensate for intermittency, nuclear seems like the worst option. It implies you have nuclear plants sitting offline until needed, or being ramped up and down. My understanding is that you really want to run nuclear plants 24/7 at full output.

You don’t have nuclear totally offline except when refueling (and MSRs might solve even that). Nuclear can dial up down relatively easily. , however. Simplistically, you just pull/push the rods out/in (yea, there’s more to it than that, and it doesn’t react instantly, but roughly speaking, that’s it).

Right but that's massively inefficient. You want a base-load power source operating at as close to it's rated output as possible for as much time as possible.

Agreed. So, just go nuclear all the way.

Its not a matter of if the nuclear reactor can increase or decrease its output, its the economics of building a very expensive machine that you then only use some of the time. A massive chunk of the cost of the nuclear plant is actually having the plant and the people working on it, if you spent all that money and paid all these people to work there but only using half its actual capacity you've practically doubled the cost.

To my understanding the per-kWh cost of the fuel for nuclear isn't the real expense, but smarter minds in the subject please feel free to correct me.

It was one major occurrence with freak weather conditions and unpreparedness for something that _rarely_, if ever, occurs in Texas every 100 years.

Infrastructure is supposed to be planned for infrequent events. Nobody wants to hear excuses when it is something they rely upon for basic needs.

> It was one major occurrence with freak weather conditions and unpreparedness for something that _rarely_, if ever, occurs in Texas every 100 years.

it happened in 2011, too, and all the warnings and published recommendations as a result of that storm weren't acted upon.

Yep, and natural gas was the big culprit in 2011, too. Valves froze, IIRC. But again, you couldn’t dial up solar and wind to compensate, so we had rolling blackouts.

This. https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-05/Reportonthe...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-disconnect-power-p... a great podcast on the blackout from 2021, it wasn't from renewables.

If only Texas had invested in weatherization to prevent issues in the winter. Their gas based powerplants also had failures during the freeze a few years ago due to ignorance/cost cutting measures.

ERCOT and the legislature didn't take their regulatory recommendations and responsibilities seriously enough after the 2011 report told them what needed to be done: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-05/Reportonthe...

Why are we wasting so much time on this website needing to debunk every reheated conservative talking points? What is the moderation doing?

I’m not sure why discussing the very real issues with renewable power is a “conservative talking point.” Why is everything assumed to be politically motivated. Everyone assume I’m throwing renewables under the bus for the 2021 grid failure. I’m not. Everything failed in 2021. Gas failed. And renewables couldn’t pick up the slack because renewable generation always slumps in the winter.

Sorry if I misinterpreted your comment, but anytime I see someone railing about Texas' outage of 2021 it's always an encore of the GOP's anti-renewables crusade in favor of oil and gas.

That's not so much the responsibility of actual mods like dang. It seems like the community moderation, eg up/downvotes, is doing the job just fine here - you've responded to the lowest-ranked comment in this thread, and it's currently greyed out. The system's working.

Actual mods allowed most thought out anti-conservative posts to be flagged. (Less thought out remained.)

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