A daily publication on clean power in the energy capital
Unit 01 / Lead Story
Houston built its fortune on oil and gas, and now the energy capital is converting: solar farms next to refineries, grid-scale batteries, and an interconnection queue full of projects waiting to plug in. We follow that buildout story by story, and what it means for the grid that keeps your air conditioning running in August.
Texas approved its first 765 kilovolt transmission lines for the Permian Basin.
The Gulf's first federal offshore wind auction leased one tract off Louisiana and drew no bids on either area offshore Galveston.
Senate Bill 6 gives ERCOT and the PUCT new power to study, charge, and curtail loads over roughly 75 megawatts.
In December 2025 the Texas grid started solving energy and reserves together every few seconds.
The capped Sunnyside dump in south Houston is set to become one of the country's largest urban solar projects.
Two Houston companies are aiming oil-field rigs and crews at the hot rock under the Gulf Coast, chasing steady power instead of hydrocarbons.
A home battery that only wakes up during an outage spends most of the year doing nothing.
A solar developer's yearly check can beat your best crop year.
The least visible reserve near the Ship Channel is a plant that agrees, for a price, to cut its own power when ERCOT runs short.
Texas built its first big wind farms more than 20 years ago.
Thermal storage lets a building make cooling at night and spend it in the afternoon.
San Antonio and Austin own their electric utilities and buy solar directly.
Federal funding backs a Texas-centered hydrogen buildout.
One electric car is noise against the ERCOT peak.
Heat, humidity, and salt air off Galveston Bay punish solar hardware.
The old first-come queue filled with projects that were never going to get built.
The 2024 storm left millions in the Houston area without power.
The old rule of thumb was that new power in Texas meant a new gas plant.
Negative prices and curtailment in the west zone follow transmission limits, not weather.
Process heat at the plants along the Ship Channel runs on gas for a reason.
Harvey moved the water-sensitive parts of a rooftop solar system off the ground floor.
Retail competition came to Houston early, but shared solar, the kind you subscribe to without owning a roof, still has no home in the competitive market.
Which oilfield skills cross to solar and storage crews, what retraining exists near the Ship Channel, and the pay comparison nobody puts on a recruiting flyer.
On a 240-acre former landfill in the Sunnyside neighborhood, a solar farm takes shape on concrete blocks that never pierce the cap, engineered for Gulf hurricane winds.
ERCOT hit an all-time peak near 85.5 GW during a statewide heat wave, and solar output set its own record the same day at roughly 20.8 GW.
Most proposed generators in ERCOT spend years in the interconnection queue before they can plug in. Solar and storage make up the bulk of the requests, and the wait shapes everything built next.
Batteries discharged a record roughly 3.9 GW into the ERCOT grid in August 2024, shifting midday solar into the evening peak. What was a pilot program now behaves like plant equipment.
The Port of Houston, the busiest American port by foreign tonnage, moves cargo with yard tractors and drayage trucks that are slowly going electric. Slow is still a direction.
Records from the heat of August 2024
All-time record set on August 20, 2024, during a statewide heat wave.
Utility-scale solar generation record, the same afternoon.
Storage feeding the grid at evening peak, August 2024.
Every new generator and storage project in ERCOT has to wait in line for a study before it can connect. The queue holds years of proposed solar, wind, and batteries, and the wait, not the technology, is often the slowest part of the build. ERCOT publishes load and resource outlooks for anyone tracking the line.
Texas solar floods the grid at midday and fades just as Houston homes crank the air conditioning. Grid batteries are the valve between the two: they charged on cheap afternoon power and discharged a record roughly 3.9 GW in August 2024, right when the load was highest.
The Port of Houston is the busiest American port by foreign tonnage, and its cranes, yard tractors, and drayage trucks run on diesel today. Electrifying that work is a slow grind measured one terminal at a time, but each switched vehicle is one less plume along the Ship Channel.
Houston's grid exists for August. Cooling drives the peak, the peak drives the buildout, and the record afternoon of August 20, 2024 showed the new stack holding: solar through the day, batteries into the evening, demand response on the margins.
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The figures on this site are illustrations, not photographs, and none of them is presented as a real scene. The numbers we cite come from the public record.
