Part 3: How Texas Can Solve Its Winter Reliability Problem
Five years after Winter Storm Uri, the ERCOT grid is still not ready for the next major winter storm. The first two installments of this series showed that demand has grown more than 20% since 2021 while firm generation capacity has barely budged, and the system’s heavy tilt toward wind, solar, and battery storage means a 1-in-10-year winter storm in 2030 could cause a full day of rolling outages. This final brief asks what it would take to fix the problem.
The analysis finds that policies driving significant new natural gas generation could raise ERCOT’s projected 2030 winter reserve margin from -1.1% to 9.4%, but even that optimistic buildout would still produce 17 hours of outages during a severe storm. That’s because a growing share of reserve capacity comes from batteries that exhaust their stored energy partway through a multi-day event. On the demand side, however, even a modest 5% reduction in peak storm demand—achievable through flexible, curtailable loads like data centers—would nearly eliminate outages entirely.
Texas needs both approaches: market reforms that let reliable generation compete on a level playing field with subsidized intermittent resources, and policies ensuring large flexible loads help absorb demand volatility rather than amplify it. Only by addressing both supply and demand can the ERCOT grid be positioned to withstand the next winter storm without leaving Texans in the dark.
Read Part 3 of the research here.