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ERCOT Grid Snapshots: Texas Grid Roundup #89

2026-02-17 · 19:41 UTC ·Texas Energy and Power Newsletter ·3 min read

Brief

Texas Energy and Power Newsletter’s latest ERCOT roundup extracts a few notable signals from the grid operator’s most recent board materials, with the clearest theme being sustained load growth in Texas. The most concrete figure in the preview is that overall transmission costs increased 65% over the past decade, yet transmission cost per megawatt-hour declined as energy usage rose, an argument the authors connect directly to economies of scale on a fixed-cost network. They also emphasize ERCOT’s finalized 2025 demand data showing that minimum demand exceeded the prior year’s comparable month in all 12 months, suggesting Texas is experiencing a broad upward shift in baseline consumption, not merely higher summer peaks. Although the preview is paywalled and only exposes a subset of the chosen slides, the framing is highly relevant to questions around ERCOT planning, transmission economics, and the effect of new large loads such as data centers on grid infrastructure utilization.

Why it matters

ERCOT’s February 2026 board-meeting roundup highlights early evidence that rising Texas electricity demand is improving transmission cost efficiency even as the system expands.

Key details

  • ERCOT data cited in the newsletter shows total transmission costs rose 65% over the last decade, but cost per megawatt-hour fell because fixed grid costs were spread across higher electricity consumption.
  • The authors explicitly tie that declining per-unit transmission cost to load growth and argue the trend should continue as more data centers come online in Texas.
  • ERCOT’s final analysis of 2025 found that every single month had a higher minimum demand than the corresponding month in 2024, indicating a structurally higher load floor rather than just isolated peak-demand events.
  • The post is based on selected slides from the most recent ERCOT Board meeting, with the editors curating roughly a dozen slides out of hundreds of pages of board presentations.
Cleaned source text

title: ERCOT Grid Snapshots: Texas Grid Roundup #89

author: Texas Energy and Power Newsletter

content_type: newsletter

publication: substack.com

published: 2026-02-17T19:41:01+00:00

source_url: gmail://19c6d1f0983411cb

word_count: 568

Our editors break down highlights and insights from the ERCOT Board's most recent meeting.

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ERCOT Grid Snapshots: Texas Grid Roundup #89

Texas Energy & Power Media

Feb 17| | | ∙| | Preview

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ERCOT Board meetings provide a wealth of information about the state of the grid; last week’s meeting is no exception.

Below are a dozen or so slides — out of the hundreds presented to the Board last week — that our editors thought were most useful (all the presentations can be found here). If there were other slides or information from the Board meeting you found particularly illuminating, please let us know in the comments.

These _Grid Roundups – along with the full archives, select episodes of the Energy Capital Podcast (including this one on how batteries are reshaping the grid, with Fluence VP Suzanne Leta), Reading and Podcast Picks, and more – are for paid subscribers.

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Transmission Costs Are Down Per Unit

Overall transmission costs have increased 65% over the last decade (the red bars), but rising energy use has resulted in a lower cost per megawatt-hour (the blue bars). When fixed system costs are spread among more users, per-unit costs decreases.

This is empirically happening in Texas. It will continue as more data centers come online.

Demand and Generation

To drive the point home, ERCOT’s final analysis of 2025 shows that _every single month_ had a higher minimum demand than the corresponding month in 2024. ...

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