The entire State of Texas is in the grips of a triple-digit heat “dome,” with dangerous heat indexes predicted for areas of south Texas Monday and beyond.

ERCOT, the operator of the statewide Texas power grid, has appealed directly to consumers and businesses urgently to reduce their power usage during peak hours (2pm to 8pm) on Monday to avoid potential shortfalls in reserve power capacity.

ERCOT has been girding for an all-time record 79 gigawatts of total power demand over the course of Monday. The projected shortage of reserve power is aggravated by predicted low wind velocities, reducing output from that source. Solar generation statewide was much nearer capacity at 81%.

Unlike most other states, which often participate in multistate back-up power-sharing agreements and cooperatives, Texas’ grid is ‘self-contained,’ and power is not sold to or purchased from outside utilities or networks. For this reason, when in-state generating or distributions assets go off-line unexpectedly or for scheduled maintenance, other generating assets within the state need to cover the resulting shortfall in output. While ERCOT was very closely monitoring its reserve power position on Monday, it does not predict any local outages or rolling blackouts. The Texas grid currently serves over 26 million residents.

The extreme heat taxing the power grid is forecast to continue into the coming weekend, with up to forty all-time local temperature records threatened by the predicted daytime highs later this week. Thus far in 2022, the state is on pace to surpass 2011 for the hottest summer ever. None of this is good news for ERCOT as it asks for restraint demand in order to to hold a prudent reserve power margin until the heat wave moderates. Compounding the extreme heat problem, the prolonged high temperatures throughout the summer has worsened an existing drought, so that 97% of the state is now in a drought, with 45% in extreme or exceptional drought.

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