Batteries, similarly, have stampeded onto the scene. They hit a record discharge level of 4,348 megawatts on October 25.
This rich clean energy medley has started reshaping the competitive ERCOT markets in ways that are immediately helpful to customers. Take the late August heat wave. ERCOT set an all-time demand record of nearly 86 gigawatts on August 20, at 4:45 p.m. But something strange happened — or didn’t happen — at the same time: The unprecedented demand failed to produce any material spike in energy prices that afternoon (dark blue line in the following chart).
“Here they’re setting a pretty big record, and prices are very low because it was coincident with solar,” explained Connor Waldoch, co-founder and head of strategy at Grid Status.
That new bastion of 20 gigawatts of Texas solar power cranked throughout the sunny hours (yellow line), negating the record demand that otherwise might have strained the system. When the sun went down, the new battery fleet jumped into the breach (magenta bars).
Power prices ultimately started spiking around 8 p.m., three hours after the peak demand moment. Average hub prices briefly hit the market’s $5,000 per megawatt-hour cap. By that point, the batteries were pushing nearly 4 gigawatts of instant power onto the wires. Batteries have a finite tank of energy, but by the time the fleet tapered off, after 9 p.m., average prices were sinking back to bargain basement territory.
In short, this record day for Texas power consumption went out with a whimper instead of rolling blackouts or bulging energy bills, thanks to the tour-de-force pairing of Texas solar and batteries. This harbinger of a new era raises a host of questions for the future of the market. How long can the battery boom last before the grid gets saturated? What happens to the many fossil fueled plants out there that used to survive on the same ERCOT price spikes that solar and batteries now effectively neutralize?
It’s way too early to answer those questions, but 2025 is sure to be another wild ride in ERCOT.
MISO solar growth
Sometimes it can feel like Texas and California are the only shows in town for clean energy construction (no, New York, your press releases don’t count!). For a healthy reminder that things are moving along elsewhere in the country, too, take a look at this chart of record solar generation in the grid managed by the Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO), which spans 15 states from the upper midwest down to the Gulf Coast.
This region became an early leader in wind power, but never did much with solar development. That’s now starting to change.
“MISO is probably an under-reported solar story — their record increased by almost 150 percent over the course of the year,” Waldoch noted.
The best solar production MISO had achieved in early 2023 was just 1,817 megawatts. In January 2024, it hit nearly 3,300 megawatts. By October 2024, MISO set a record of more than 8,000 megawatts, meaning peak solar output more than quadrupled in less than two years.
That’s still a much smaller solar fleet than California or Texas, even though MISO spans much more territory. But the key metric to understand has never been absolute capacity (so miniscule for so long) but rather the rate of growth. MISO’s peak solar production grew considerably faster than ERCOT’s over the last two years, heralding its entrance to the solar big leagues.
U.K. renewables beat fossil fuels
We’ll take a virtual jump across the pond to acknowledge a major inflection point in the United Kingdom, the very place that first popularized the industrial coal consumption that ultimately saddled the globe with a climate crisis.
This year, for the first time ever, the U.K. generated more electricity from renewables than from fossil fuels.
That renewables category includes wind (the biggest contributor by far), solar, and hydropower, and has been climbing steadily in market share for a decade. It reached nearly 40 percent in 2024. Fossil fuels, comprising coal and fossil gas, have tanked from above 60 percent a decade ago. Britain closed its last remaining coal plant, the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, in late September.
The U.K. also generated about 15 percent of its electricity from nuclear. All told, the energy mix is now more than 50 percent carbon-free, and that percentage is rising. Britain may have taught the world to burn fossil fuels for industry and transportation, but it’s moving past that era now.
