In any other year, May 14 may well have been an energy disaster in Texas.
Temperatures climbed to seasonal levels not seen in over a century: 92F in Dallas, 95F in Houston and 104F in Laredo. Air conditioners hummed en masse and power demand surged. Meanwhile, scores of natural-gas powered generators were offline, getting tuned up for summer.
But Texas skies were pretty sunny and windy and startups had spent the preceding months building big banks of batteries to store electricity. When power demand peaked around 4:30 in the afternoon, almost half of the electricity on the grid was coming from renewables, according to the energy analytics platform GridStatus.IO. As the sun set, battery banks that had been soaking up electrons in the heat of the day stepped up to cover 8% of demand, keeping power flowing.
“Batteries are very good at handling these types of events,” said Andrew Gilligan, director of commercial strategy at Fluence Energy Inc., a battery developer with three storage sites in Texas. “Things have gotten a lot better than a couple years ago.”
This summer will be an energy doozy in the US as climate …