Watch out Texas. August is coming, and green energy won’t keep your air conditioning on

The summer weather in Texas has been fairly mild so far this June, with temperatures well below the near-record heat seen last year in one of the warmest summers in recent decades. But Texans would do well to prepare as best they can for much hotter weather – and worse, potential power grid interruptions at the same time – soon to come.

In recent testimony to the state legislature, grid managers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) told policymakers the state faces up to a 16 per cent chance of rolling blackouts in the depths of the August summer heat. That warning comes as no surprise to Texans like me, who remember last August, when ERCOT was forced to put out voluntary power conservation requests to consumers and businesses on what seemed like almost a daily basis. It’s an inconvenience to which many Texans have grown accustomed in recent years as the state’s grid, overloaded with unpredictable, intermittent wind and solar capacity, has trended increasingly into an unstable state.

The grid’s main weakness, a lack of adequate dispatchable thermal reserve capacity, has been well understood since 2011, when a major winter storm – comparable to February 2021’s Winter Storm Uri – caused days-long blackouts. But the lingering problem was largely ignored by power generation companies, which focused on building new wind and solar capacity to take advantage of an array of state and federal subsidies.