In contrast, Texas has no qualms about building more gas plants — the self-professedly laissez-faire state even created a taxpayer-funded loan program to help private gas-plant developers compete in the marketplace. That’s why it’s striking that Texas beat out California for wind, utility-scale solar, and battery construction in 2024.
At the start of 2020, ERCOT set a record with about 2,000 megawatts of instantaneous solar production, per data visualized by Grid Status. This year, ERCOT solar production blasted past 21,000 megawatts — that’s an expansion of more than 10 times in less than four years. This also outpaced California’s record for utility-scale solar production, of nearly 20,000 megawatts.
Batteries, similarly, have stampeded onto the scene. They hit a record discharge level of 4,348 megawatts on October 25.
This rich clean energy medley has started reshaping the competitive ERCOT markets in ways that are immediately helpful to customers. Take the late August heat wave. ERCOT set an all-time demand record of nearly 86 gigawatts on August 20, at 4:45 p.m. But something strange happened — or didn’t happen — at the same time: The unprecedented demand failed to produce any material spike in energy prices that afternoon (dark blue line in the following chart).
“Here they’re setting a pretty big record, and prices are very low because it was coincident with solar,” explained Connor Waldoch, co-founder and head of strategy at Grid Status.
That new bastion of 20 gigawatts of Texas solar power cranked throughout the sunny hours (yellow line), negating the record demand that otherwise might have strained the system. When the sun went down, the new battery fleet jumped into the breach (magenta bars).
Power prices ultimately started spiking around 8 p.m., three hours after the peak demand moment. Average hub prices briefly hit the market’s $5,000-per-megawatt-hour cap. By that point, the batteries were pushing nearly 4 gigawatts of instant power onto the wires. Batteries have a finite tank of energy, but by the time the fleet tapered off, after 9 p.m., average prices were sinking back to bargain-basement territory.
In short, this record day for Texas power consumption went out with a whimper instead of rolling blackouts or bulging energy bills, thanks to the tour-de-force pairing of Texas solar and batteries. This harbinger of a new era raises a host of questions for the future of the market. How long can the battery boom last before the grid gets saturated? What happens to the many fossil-fueled plants out there that used to survive on the same ERCOT price spikes that solar and batteries now effectively neutralize?
It’s way too early to answer those questions, but 2025 is sure to be another wild ride in ERCOT.