Most of Texas just had its busiest week ever for electricity
The power grid that serves most of Texas set a new record in August 2026. It was not one wild afternoon. It was six weeks in a row, each one busier than the old record.
Most of Texas gets its electricity through one grid, run by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. A grid is the network of power plants and power lines that carries electricity to homes, schools and stores. Load is how much electricity everyone on the grid is using at that moment.
Basis: EIA, “Weekly average load in ERCOT continues near record high” (September 3, 2026), which describes ERCOT as the regional transmission organization “for most of the state.”
For the week ending August 22, 2026, the hour-by-hour load in ERCOT averaged 74.5 gigawatts (GW), a record. A gigawatt is a billion watts. The next week, ending August 29, came in just below that at 73.7 GW.
Basis: Same EIA article. EIA's note: weekly average load is hourly data averaged across the week.
The old record was 70.0 GW, set in 2023. The new one beat it by 6%. It was also 10% higher than the busiest week of summer 2025.
Basis: Same EIA article.
Here is the part that stands out: it was not one lucky spike. All six weeks from the week ending July 25 through the week ending August 29 were higher than the 2023 record.
Basis: Same EIA article.
Why so busy? EIA says sustained high temperatures have contributed to the high demand. Notice the word contributed. EIA names heat as one reason, not the only one.
Basis: Same EIA article: “Sustained high temperatures have contributed to persistently high electricity demand.”
How much of the record came from the heat, and how much from other things? The article does not split it up, so we can't either. “Heat helped” is in the article. “Heat did all of it” is not.
※ A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
📊 Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.