When the summer heat peaks in Texas, the familiar hum of air conditioners across the state grows a little louder, and the demand for electricity on the state’s grid shoots up. On Monday, as temperatures soared past 100 degrees across the state, the grid reached a new record demand: 74,531 megawatts of electricity in one hour. That beat last year’s record—which was set during the state’s fifth hottest summer on record—by 1,000 megawatts, the equivalent of powering 200,000 homes for the day.
This strain on the system prompted the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s grid operator, to issue an emergency alert urging customers to reduce their electricity consumption during the hottest part of the day. The state’s grid has the lowest reserve margins, or extra supply, out of any grid system in the United States this summer. If customers had needed more electricity than predicted, there wouldn’t be much room for error, and ERCOT might have needed to initiate rolling blackouts to prevent a larger, more dangerous power outage.
Given these tight margins, a recent study published in Nature Communications about the effects of climate change on global energy demand seems especially troubling. Researchers estimate that climate change could drive up global energy demand by as much as 58 percent in the next 30 years.
