On Sunday, Aug. 23, Texas homes and businesses drew 90,411 megawatts of electricity in a single hour — more than on any weekend day in the state’s history, and more than on any day ever recorded except one.
The number comes from ERCOT’s own peak demand records, kept by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the agency that operates the power grid for most of the state. One megawatt is enough to serve roughly 250 homes during the hours when demand is highest. Sunday’s load was the rough equivalent of 22.6 million households running at once.
What makes that figure unusual is the day it landed on. Weekends have always been the grid’s easy stretch. Offices empty out, factories throttle back, and demand sags well below the weekday peak. That gap is shrinking. ERCOT’s weekend record fell four times in nine days this month — 87,781 megawatts on Aug. 15, then 88,018 on Aug. 16, then 89,891 on Aug. 22, then 90,411 on Aug. 23. As recently as July 26, the highest weekend load of the year stood at 86,238.
Sunday’s total came within 678 megawatts — about 170,000 homes’ worth — of the all-time record of 91,089 megawatts, set on a Wednesday, July 22 of this year. Before 2026, the highest demand Texas had ever recorded was 85,508 megawatts, on Aug. 10, 2023. The grid has added more than 5,500 megawatts to its ceiling in three years.
ERCOT cautions that all of these figures are preliminary. The council marks every record as unofficial until final settlement calculations are done, and it counts only the average load across a full clock hour, not the momentary spikes that show up on live dashboards.
The reason a Sunday can now rival a weekday goes to the heart of an argument the state’s utility regulator is having right now. Traditional electricity demand follows human schedules. The new demand largely does not. Data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations and factories switching from fuel to electricity run at close to full output around the clock, seven days a week, which flattens the difference between a Tuesday and a Sunday. When weekend load climbs toward the weekday peak, the grid loses the recovery time it has always used for maintenance and for catching its breath.
Who pays to build for that load is unsettled. The Public Utility Commission of Texas is writing a new rule governing how very large electricity users connect to the grid, under a section of the state utilities code that deals specifically with big new customers. Commission staff filed a memo carrying draft recommended changes to the proposed rule on Aug. 24 in Project 58481, according to the commission’s public filing index. The memo itself is not publicly readable, and the commission has not published the current draft.
One of the live questions is money up front — how much a large customer must put down before it can hold a place in the interconnection queue, the waiting line for permission to plug in. A filing from the developer Mission Power backs what it calls Chairman Thomas Gleeson’s “gradual escalator framework” for “gradual posting of the $50,000 IA security posting” — the deposit tied to an interconnection agreement, the contract that lets a customer connect — phasing it in rather than demanding it at once. That figure and that framework come from the filing’s own title in the commission’s index, not from the draft rule. Companies including Vistra, NRG Energy, Crusoe Technologies and EdgeConneX have filed comments in the proceeding, as have the state’s utility consumer advocate and an association of municipal utilities.
The distinction that matters for Texans is a plain one: whether a project arriving on the grid brings its own generation, its own water and its own capital, or leans on infrastructure everyone else already paid for. A facility that shows up with a power plant attached adds to the state’s supply. One that simply plugs in adds to the line.
August’s numbers show how little slack is left to argue over. Texas ran six consecutive days of record August demand from Aug. 15 through Aug. 20, topping out at 90,353 megawatts, and then set the weekend mark three days later. The rule that decides who pays for the next round of that growth is still being written.