Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas

Controllers make daily forecasts of the next day’s electric demand and supply down to every five minutes.

Texans have lived for years with a looming energy crisis. Experts always saw it on the horizon and warned, periodically, of its arrival. The state was growing, they observed, and the electricity supply was not keeping up. When the reckoning came, it would come in the form of rolling blackouts. Such predictions often yielded reporting like this (by yours truly).

Then, this month, things stopped looking so bad.

The news came as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) released its annual forecast of how much electricity Texas will have in the coming years. ERCOT has traditionally warned that, in the future, there may not be enough energy on reserve during times of peak use, like hot summer days. This year, the message was different.

“Our view is that the growth in peak hour demand on hot summer afternoons will not be as strong as we had forecasted in the past,” Warren Lasher, ERCOT director of System Planning, told reporters on a Friday press call.

What changed is not the just amount of energy available (that’s growing, but slowly), it’s the fact that Texans’ electricity use has stopped rising with Texas’ economic growth. What’s behind it? Continue Reading →