TX utility solar makes more power than CA for the first time yesterday

While lots has been said about wind turbines in TX, much less has been mentioned about the massive amount of solar buildout in the last 3-5 years. Before that, the grid had about 3GW of solar that would be seen during an average summer day (reference: a nuke is about 1.2GW, big coal plants are ~600MW and the grid on a summer day will use 70GW+). Yesterday, in a season when solar has a worse capacity factor than summer (tilt of earth thing..), ERCOT managed to hit 16.64GW of solar for a 5-minute interval. This is a new ERCOT record after setting a few record last week. For comparison, the last CAISO record I could find (Oct '23) was 16.06GW.

The growth of solar power is something very few people talk about but it really saved the day last summer and this summer is primed to provide huge peak-coincident benefits to the grid.

Installed solar capacity in ERCOT now beats Spain.