When Texas’s privately-run electrical grid collapsed amid a battery of winter storms in February of 2021, it plunged over 4.5 million people into darkness, and contributed to hundreds of deaths due to the lack of water, food, and heat.
A similarly tragic story almost unfolded in July of this year — had in not been for the deployment of a jaw dropping amount of solar power infrastructure that kept the grid from collapsing under the strain.
New reporting by the Texas Tribune details the state’s rapid adoption of solar energy, specifically solar panels and storage batteries. The paper notes that when the organization that manages state’s electrical grid — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) — broke record energy demands on both July 21st and 22nd, it hardly registered as an event, because its solar infrastructure ensured there was a 20,000 megawatt buffer padding the grid’s capacity.
“We hit an all time peak, and we had no issue hitting that peak,” Thomas Gleeson, chair of Texas’s Public Utility Commission, told the Tribune.
