Two months into a prolonged, record-breaking heat wave, Texans have once again become very familiar with conservation alerts from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The agency has repeatedly asked residents to turn up thermostats and save electricity during the hottest summer afternoons. And to everyone’s pleasant surprise, the grid has held up—thanks in large part to people heeding conservation alerts, and to renewable energy projects picking up slack as the state’s fossil fuel plants falter.
But there’s no guarantee the grid will continue to function in summers to come. The state’s population is steadily growing, contributing to record demand for electricity. At the same time, planetary temperatures grow hotter and hotter: by 2036, the state climatologist’s office expects Texas to have twice as many triple-digit days each year as it’s had on average in the past 20 years.
State leaders so far have responded to the seasonal electricity crunch by fixating almost entirely on supply (even encouraging power plants to delay maintenance), addressing demand only through haphazard calls for temporary conservation.
