Energy Efficiency in the Spotlight at the PUC Today

For decades, the PUC has held two meetings per year focused on energy efficiency in Texas. Today’s meeting of the Energy Efficiency Implementation Project (EEIP) will be the first one led by the new Energy Efficiency Division of the PUC. 

At the meeting, Texas A&M researchers will present findings of their study (conducted for ERCOT) showing that a large-scale push to install high-efficiency heat pumps and insulation in Texas homes could reduce winter peak demand by 23,000 megawatts. That might have prevented the traumatic outages Texas experienced three winters ago — during Winter Storm Uri, ERCOT initiated over 20,000 megawatts of load shed. 

The report shows that any serious reliability push demands a strong, comprehensive energy efficiency strategy: it’s the difference between catastrophe and an uneventful winter storm…