← ERCOT July 2026 heat-wave case study

Timelapse

ERCOT July 2026 Heat Wave Timelapse

Thirty-three seconds over ERCOT's July 2026 heat wave: real-time prices at 724 mapped settlement points, the two days the demand record fell, and a grid that never left normal conditions.

Eight days, July 17 to 24, in thirty-three seconds. The map colors each of 724 mapped ERCOT settlement points by its own real-time price, drawing a ring around any point above $500/MWh. Dials at the right carry station temperatures at Midland, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, and the chip below them carries ERCOT's own grid condition, which stayed normal for all 192 hours of the window. The load panel plots each day against the 85,508 MW record ERCOT had held since August 2023; the curve crosses it on July 21 and again, higher, on July 22. Three windows run at fifteen-minute resolution instead of hourly: the July 20 evening ERCOT came within 231 MW of the record, and the July 21 and July 22 afternoons it broke it. Warm lines mark transmission constraints binding in that interval, on approximate corridor geometry from HIFLD and OpenStreetMap (line geometry © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL); a dashed line is a constraint whose endpoints are both verified but whose circuit appears in neither source, so its route is drawn as a straight line between them. Corridors are drawn only where the identity campaign resolved both endpoints to a real yard: 10,402 of the window's 20,654 binding-constraint intervals, and about two thirds of the line-shaped ones. The rest bound without a line on the map.

This timelapse is from the ERCOT July 2026 heat-wave case study. Watching it, the thing to notice is what does not happen: no emergency is declared, and the price surface stays unremarkable while the transmission constraints underneath it are binding hard.

Cite this

Corey Balgeman, "ERCOT July 2026 heat-wave timelapse," Grid Flexibility, 2026. https://gridflexibility.fyi/case-studies/ercot-heat-wave-july-2026/timelapse

Licensed CC BY 4.0: free to republish with attribution. License details.

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Last updated: 2026-08-18.