Texas broke its solar, wind, and battery records in one spring week

As winter turns to spring, Texas is setting new records with its nation-leading clean energy fleet.

In just the first week of March, the ERCOT power grid that supplies nearly all of Texas set records for most wind production (28,470 megawatts), most solar production (24,818 megawatts), and greatest battery discharge (4,833 megawatts). Only two years ago, the most that batteries had ever injected into the ERCOT grid at once was 766 megawatts. Now the battery fleet is providing nearly as much instantaneous power as Texas nuclear power plants, which contribute around 5,000 megawatts.

“These records, along with the generator interconnection queue, point towards a cleaner and more dynamic future for ERCOT,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist studying the energy system at The University of Texas at Austin.

The famously developer-friendly Lone Star State has struggled to add new gas power plants lately, even after offering up billions of taxpayer dollars for a dedicated loan program to private gas developers. Solar and battery additions since last March average about 1 gigawatt per month, based on ERCOT’s figures, Texas energy analyst Doug Lewin said. In 2024, Texas produced almost twice as much wind and solar electricity as California.

When weather conditions align, the state’s abundant clean-energy resources come alive — and those conditions aligned last week amid sunny, windy, warm weather. On March 2 at 2:40 p.m. CST, renewables collectively met a record 76% of ERCOT demand.

Then, on Wednesday evening, solar production started to dip with the setting sun. More than 23,000 megawatts of thermal power plants were missing in action. Most of those were offline for scheduled repairs, but ERCOT data show that nearly half of all recent outages have been ​“forced,” meaning unscheduled.