AUSTIN – A growing number of industrial-scale users is straining Texas' power grid and could set the stage for massive construction of transmission lines across the state, ERCOT's chief announced Tuesday.
With the Permian Basin's large-scale power users and the influx of artificial intelligence data centers and Bitcoin miners, ERCOT predicts a 37% jump in power demand from industrial-scale users. This is in addition to forecasts for 2023, which already expected a huge amount of new demand by the end of the decade.
The increase is ushering in what ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas called a “new era of planning,” especially in the Permian Basin, where oil and gas entrepreneurs are already projecting unmet power demand. .
ERCOT, which operates the power grid for much of Texas, raised its forecast for the power needed for new large-scale users from 111 gigawatts to 152 gigawatts. Actual new demand from these promising projects is likely to be lower than these projections, but the sheer gigawatts remain eye-popping for a power grid that has seen demand records regularly broken. It is something.
The all-time record for peak demand on the Texas power grid was 85.5 gigawatts, set in August 2023.
Continued economic growth in Texas, an increase in new data centers and increased grid-connected oil and gas production in the Permian Basin are driving demand growth, Vegas said.
“The combined effects of all of these are starting to reveal a very different picture than previously predicted,” he said.
Vegas announced the latest forecast at the ERCOT board meeting in Austin on Tuesday. The new numbers appear to lay the groundwork for a push to build more power lines across the state.
The city of Vegas said lack of access to electricity could become a bottleneck for new investment in Texas.
It seems possible to produce electricity for these projects. ERCOT has indicated that vast amounts of solar power and battery storage are planned for the power grid. Although natural gas accounts for a much smaller share of planned power generation, it is on the rise.
However, the power lines to deliver power from the power plants and solar arrays are not in place and could still take several years.
“It will still take three to six years to build the transmission facilities and infrastructure, so we need to accelerate each aspect of the planning process and be able to look further into the future and predict what will happen,” Vegas said. Ta.
The cost of new transmission trickles down to electricity bills for Texans within the ERCOT power grid. It shows up as a line item on the residential bill and also accounts for a significant portion of what customers pay per kilowatt hour.
The new projections for what ERCOT calls “substantial loads” are part of a bill passed during the 2023 legislative session that would lower the standards for new industrial-scale electricity users the agency must consider when planning transmission projects. Partly based.
Prior to the passage of House Bill 5066, ERCOT did not count prospective new large loads until the developer provided certain financial commitments. Leading up to its passage, some industry officials were concerned that the bill would lead to more speculative power line construction.
But University of Texas professor Joshua Rose said the need for new power lines across the state is likely to remain high.
“I've yet to see any transmission infrastructure sitting idle,” said Rose, a researcher at the Weber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin. “I'm not so worried about it building something for nothing and going to waste.”
ERCOT wants to speed up the planning process because transmission lines require vast tracts of land across multiple counties and take longer to develop than power plants.
“You're just going to have more stakeholders, and every time you have more stakeholders, you're going to have more opinions about how things should and shouldn't go,” Rose said.
