AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It has been hot in Texas this week, with the heat index surpassing 110 degrees in many parts of the state. Cities are opening cooling centers. Nonprofits are passing out fans. But, you know, the state's power grid has held up despite longstanding concerns about the grid's readiness. KUT's Mose Buchele has this report.
MOSE BUCHELE, BYLINE: Texas is known for its hot summers, but this week has been something else.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: This year we saw a delay in the extreme heat, but it's here for sure - 10 straight days in triple-digit territory. And this hot spell will continue.
BUCHELE: Anxiety about the power grid has been a fact of life ever since a catastrophic statewide blackout in the winter of 2021. Since then, frequent energy conservation requests from state officials - almost a dozen last year alone - have kept Texans worried. But so far, the system has hummed along even as energy demand hit record highs this week.
JOSHUA RHODES: And no conservation alert. The lights stayed on, and air conditioners stayed rolling.
BUCHELE: Joshua Rhodes is a research scientist at UT Austin who studies the grid. He says a rapid buildout of solar farms and big, utility-scale batteries have been key.
RHODES: So if you look at last year, we had about 12,000 megawatts of solar online. And this year we had 20.
BUCHELE: That's about enough electricity to power 5 million homes on a hot Texas day. And some of it goes into those large-scale battery facilities that send it back to the grid after the sun sets, when demand is still high.
RHODES: As well as, you know, thousands of megawatts more batteries around to be able to discharge later in the day.
BUCHELE: But challenges remain. State grid operators predict a continued massive increase in electric demand as the population grows and the oil and gas sector expands. In addition, power-hungry data centers and artificial intelligence facilities are adding to the pressure. And while the statewide grid is held this summer, big storms have brought devastating local power outages to cities. Professor Daniel Cohan teaches environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston.
DANIEL COHAN: The majority of blackouts don't come because the grid runs out of juice. They come because lines go down, transformers go down. We have outages in local neighborhoods. And our power grid is an embarrassment in those ways.
BUCHELE: He points to Hurricane Beryl that knocked out power to millions for days in the Houston area last month, prompting lawmakers to start a review of state utility policies. Cohan says local outages are a problem that will only get worse as climate changes bring more devastating storms to the region.
For NPR News, I'm Mose Buchele in Austin.
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