Solar and battery storage account for 70 percent of the generation waiting in the 460-gigawatt interconnection queue run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state's grid operator, according to Inside Climate News. Natural gas projects hold less than 17 percent of that queue.
The imbalance has drawn attention from Republican lawmakers in Texas. State Sen. Phil King asked ERCOT and PUC leaders whether a rule should require that 50 percent, or some other share, of new generation be dispatchable rather than leaving the outcome to market forces, Inside Climate News reported.
ERCOT chief executive Pablo Vegas told the lawmakers that well over 90 percent of the energy resources that have come onto the grid are renewables and batteries, according to the same report.
The queue composition and the additions figure describe different stages of the same pipeline: what has already connected, and what is lined up behind it. Both point the same direction, and both underpin the question King put to the regulator and the grid operator about whether interconnection rules should carry a technology condition.
Summer operating data cited by Inside Climate News gives the reliability backdrop. On July 22, Texas electricity demand exceeded 91 gigawatts while more than 20 gigawatts of capacity remained available.
Vegas referenced the existing thermal fleet in his testimony, pointing to the gas plants connected to the grid and the 15 coal plants across the state.
A dispatchable minimum at the point of interconnection would be a departure from the energy-only market design that has governed which projects connect in the ERCOT region. Under the approach King described, developers would face a technology test rather than a purely economic one, and the 70 percent share now held by solar and storage in the queue would have to compress to meet any threshold applied to new connections.