Hourly electricity load in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas averaged a record 74.5 gigawatts for the week ending August 22, 2026, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Wednesday.
Demand eased only slightly the following week. The average for the week ending August 29 was 73.7 GW.
ERCOT is the regional transmission organization for most of Texas. The load figures measure electricity demand on its grid, calculated by averaging hourly readings across each week rather than taking a single peak hour.
Six weeks above the old record
The week ending August 22 came in 6% above the previous record weekly average of 70.0 GW, set in 2023, and 10% above the highest weekly hourly average recorded in the summer of 2025, according to the EIA.
The stretch of elevated demand has been sustained rather than momentary. The agency said the past six weeks — from the week ending July 25 through the week ending August 29 — have all exceeded the 2023 record.
The EIA attributed the persistently high demand to sustained high temperatures.
Data center interconnections under review
Amid the record demand, ERCOT is auditing proposals from data centers seeking to connect to the grid, the EIA said. The audit follows what the agency described as Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s recent moratorium on new data center interconnections.
The EIA item did not give the number of pending proposals, the load they would represent, or the terms and duration of the moratorium.
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Weekly average load in ERCOT continues near record high” (Today in Energy, in-brief analysis; principal contributor Alex Mey), released September 3, 2026. Data source is the EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor; weekly average load is based on hourly data that are averaged across the week.