Inside ERCOT’s Monthly Outlook for Resource Adequacy — and what it means for businesses bracing for another Texas summer.
Every spring, the same question lands on the desk of every operations leader in Texas: is the grid going to hold up this summer? The honest answer is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and the data needed to answer it is publicly available — most businesses just don’t know where to look.
ERCOT publishes a Monthly Outlook for Resource Adequacy (MORA) — a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood that the grid will need to issue an Energy Emergency Alert (EEA) or call for controlled outages during the upcoming month. It replaced the older Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy (SARA) report, and it gives a much more granular hour-by-hour picture of where risk concentrates.
The Big Picture for Summer 2026
Coming into summer 2026, ERCOT’s December 2025 Capacity, Demand and Reserves report showed the planning reserve margin entering negative territory in the net peak load hour for summer 2026. That sounds alarming, and in some scenarios it is — but it requires unpacking.
The key distinction is between the gross peak load hour (typically late afternoon, when demand is highest) and the net peak load hour (typically early evening, after solar generation has rolled off but demand remains elevated). Battery storage has made enormous gains in covering the gross peak. The net peak — the hours from roughly 7 to 9 p.m. on the hottest days — is where the system is tightest.
What’s Helping This Summer
- Battery storage is up sharply. Texas has added enormous battery capacity over the past two years, and those resources are specifically valuable in the evening ramp hours when solar generation drops off.
- New gas-fired generation is coming online. Several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation has been added to address reserve adequacy concerns.
- Improved operational rules. ERCOT has refined how it commits resources, manages ancillary services, and uses dynamic transmission line ratings — all of which squeeze more reliability out of the same physical assets.
- Demand response programs. Emergency Response Service (ERS) and other demand-side programs continue to grow, providing additional buffer during tight conditions.
What’s Working Against It
- Load growth is real. Even before the SB 6 large-load reckoning, ERCOT’s mid-term load forecast has been climbing. New industrial, residential, and data center load is being added faster than at any point in the grid’s history.
- Weather is volatile. Texas summers are getting hotter on average, and extreme heat events drive both higher demand and higher forced outages on the generation fleet.
- Variable renewables increase forecast uncertainty. As wind and solar make up a larger share of generation, weather forecast errors translate more directly into capacity uncertainty during critical hours.
- The South Texas Interconnection constraint persists. A specific transmission limitation continues to require operational mitigations to avoid any risk of firm load shed under unlikely conditions.
What This Means for Your Business
The probability of a widespread firm-load-shed event this summer remains low, but the probability of price events — periods where wholesale prices spike to thousands of dollars per megawatt-hour — is meaningfully higher than it was even three years ago. For customers on index-based or pass-through contracts, those events can drive single-month bills that exceed an entire normal quarter.
Three things every Texas business should do before the heat sets in:
- Know your contract. Pull it out and read it. Understand whether you have fixed-price, indexed, or hybrid pricing, and identify every line item that floats with market conditions.
- Know your peak demand pattern. When does your facility hit its peak kW draw? If it overlaps with system peak hours (typically 4–8 p.m. in the summer), demand charges are likely a significant portion of your bill, and there may be operational changes that pay back quickly.
- Sign up for ERCOT alerts. TXANS (Texas Advisory and Notification System) sends notifications about grid conditions. It’s free, and it gives you early warning before tight conditions become emergency conditions.
The grid will probably be fine this summer. But “probably fine” is not a procurement strategy. The customers who handle volatile summers best are the ones who prepared for them in April.
Take the Next Step
Want to know exactly how exposed your facility is to a hot, tight summer? Amerigy Energy can run a load and contract analysis that quantifies your exposure to summer price events and identifies hedging or operational changes that protect your downside.