System-Wide Demand

Data from 05/06/2024 to 05/20/2024

System-Wide Demand Description

System-Wide Demand displays the current and historical power demand of the ERCOT grid, which is the expected total electrical power that is required to be provided to the entire grid. The scheduled generation for the total load ('load' is an engineering term that means the recipient/consumer of electrical power) is calculated with the expected total demand of all customers, among many other variables, so ERCOT uses dynamic forecasting models to try to maximally reduce the error between the forecasted demand and actual demand. Naturally, one may wonder how difficult correctly predicting the total system demand could be, or why it's so important to be as accurate as possible. For starters, ERCOT serves at least 26 million Texans, most of whom are residential consumers with smaller loads plus a smaller number of commercial and other non-residential consumers with typically much larger loads. Each load contributes its own variability to the total load and demand of the system. A few other major factors of variability in demand include weather and social events (such as the Super Bowl). It's important to be as accurate as possible so that the total generation is controlled to be as close to the total actual demand; the difference in power between generation and demand causes variance in the system frequency, which is very sensitive and must be kept relatively stable. This data is updated every 15 minutes.

Fun Fact: The ERCOT system had a record peak demand of 74,820 MW in August 2019. (Source)

Data Sources