Amid the record heat, Businesses and Utilities will be in danger of running short on electricity. When demand for electricity begins to spike, at roughly 4 pm hit roughly 50 times it regular price on Sunday, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
ERCOT expected demand to peak Monday afternoon at just shy of 83,000 megawatts — about 3 percent higher than the record that was set last year.
The grid has just less than 6,000 megawatts in reserve capacity, according to ERCOT. When afternoon comes, those numbers can spike even more, according to an analysis from BloombergNEF.
Tuesday ERCOT averaged just over $4,000 per megawatt hour in real-time reading, more than double the day-ahead prices.
That’s nearly 100 times what prices were the previous week, before the heat wave began.
The state agency “likely” paid power plants a billion dollars last Tuesday, BNEF found. While power customers paid $1.7 billion that day.
That price hike was supply as much as demand. While the state’s steadily increasing solar supply has helped offset the record load on ERCOT’s grid, West Texas wind turbines have been underproducing.
