At last week’s ERCOT board meeting, the Texas grid operator presented its winter preparedness outlook. While the upcoming winter presents a greater risk of outages, more than 10,000 MW of new generation capacity was added to the grid in the previous year, lowering the probability that extreme cold will trigger an emergency.

However, despite predictions of overall above normal temps this winter, a possibility of an extreme cold event exists. Record-breaking demand is forecast for January at 78,359 MW and ERCOT lists the probability of emergency conditions at 8.7%, an improvement from the previous winter at 11.6%.

The trend now for ERCOT is for warm winters with an extreme cold event.  ERCOT said that ocean temperatures, atmospheric patterns, soil moisture and other conditions resemble 2021 when Winter Storm Uri became the single biggest event in energy history.