ERCOT right now
The Texas grid as it stands this minute — how much load is on it, what is generating, how much headroom is left, and what power is costing. Everything below comes from ERCOT's own public dashboard feeds, which update about every five minutes.
Load and headroom
Committed capacity is what ERCOT has online and obligated to run; the gap between it and demand is the cushion the grid is operating on. The dashed lines carry ERCOT's own forecast through the rest of the day, which is where a tight evening announces itself hours ahead.
What is generating
The shape of a Texas day is mostly solar arriving and leaving. Watch the gas band thicken as the sun drops — the early-evening ramp is the hardest hour on the grid, and it is the hour batteries were built for.
What it costs
Real-time prices settle every fifteen minutes at each hub. They sit near the cost of the marginal gas unit most of the time, go negative when west Texas wind has nowhere to go, and run to the offer cap when reserves get thin. The spread between hubs is congestion — the grid wanting to move power it has no room to move.
Notes on the data
Where these numbers come from, and what they do and don't mean
Four unauthenticated feeds behind ERCOT's public dashboards:
supply-demand, fuel-mix, systemWidePrices
and daily-prc. No API key, no registration; they are the same JSON
that ERCOT's own Grid Conditions and System-Wide Prices pages draw.
The page prefers live data. On load it renders a snapshot baked in at build time, then tries to fetch the feeds directly from your browser; if that works the badge turns green and the board refreshes every five minutes. If your browser can't reach ERCOT the snapshot stays up and the badge says so, with the timestamp it was taken.
Demand is instantaneous load in MW, not the daily energy totals the historical dashboard charts — a 70,000 MW afternoon is roughly a 1,700 GWh day. Committed capacity is resources online and obligated, not everything installed. PRC is physical responsive capability: the reserve ERCOT can call on within seconds to arrest a frequency drop, and the number that drives its emergency levels. Fuel groups match the historical dashboard — hydro, batteries and miscellaneous sit in "Other", and battery charging is floored at zero in the stack because a stacked area cannot show a negative band; the capacity panel shows it signed.
Prices are settlement point prices in dollars per MWh. The chart's axis is symmetric-log: linear through zero, logarithmic past it. That is unusual enough to flag, but a linear axis on a day that touches the offer cap renders every normal hour as a flat line at the bottom.
Times are Central, taken from the offsets in ERCOT's own timestamps rather than from your clock. On the two DST changeover days the 24-hour axis will be an hour short or long.
Source: ERCOT public dashboard feeds (Grid Conditions, Supply and Demand, Fuel Mix, System-Wide Prices). Not affiliated with ERCOT. For the long view, see the historical dashboard built from EIA-930. Snapshot baked August 25, 2026 at 10:57 AM CDT.