This article has been updated.
For the second summer in a row, San Antonio is seeing record-breaking heat hang over the city. San Antonio got national attention last month when it reached a heat index of 117 degrees — a new record.
While this past June had fewer triple-digit degree days overall than last year’s, two extreme heat waves have hit San Antonio already this year.
While this particular hot spell is the first of this year, hotter summers in Texas are likely going to be the new normal — or the new abnormal, if you ask Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.
He said Texas is on average 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it was a century ago, thanks to climate change.
“That means that hot days are about 2 degrees warmer than they used to be, and cold days are about 2 degrees warmer than they used to be,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “This heat wave is several degrees warmer than normal, and it’s mostly weather-driven — but climate change is adding to its intensity.”
The current heat wave is expected to last through the middle of next week, said Orlando Bermúdez, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service.
It’s being caused by a subtropical ridge of high pressure, which acts as a heat dome, encapsulating the hot air around us like a glass bowl and deflecting storms from moving into the area.
“Every year, this ridge sits across the Southwestern U.S., sometimes sitting more to the east and keeping that heat there,” Bermúdez said. “That’s what we’re looking at next week, which means it could get even hotter” than it is this week.
The latest onslaught of heat comes on the heels of a 2022 summer that registered 58 days of triple-digit temperatures.
Unlike Nielsen-Gammon, however, Andrew Quigley, another meteorologist for the National Weather Service, wasn’t so sure we can call record-breaking summers our new normal — we’ve definitely had a couple of really hot summers back to back, he told the San Antonio Report, but it’s hard to see if that’s a long-term trend yet.
“All we have to do is go back to 2021 and 2020 and we hardly had any 100-degree days at all over South Central Texas,” he said. “So we’ve had two warm summers, but this isn’t necessarily a signal of any sort of new normal, so to speak.”
It’s hard to say what the rest of the summer will look like, but climate predictions expect El Niño, a climate pattern marked by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, to move into the area by early fall, Quigley said.
El Niño typically brings with it wetter, cooler conditions.
More people, higher energy demands
With the record-breaking heat this summer has come record-breaking energy demand in a state that seems to also be constantly teetering on the edge of another energy crisis.
Renewables — solar and wind energy — are keeping Texas afloat, as it continues to see high demand.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas — the state’s electric grid operator — said power use reached a preliminary 80,828 megawatts June 27, topping the grid’s previous record of 80,148 megawatts set July 20, 2022.
Last summer ERCOT saw that record broken 11 times.
That demand is coming from Texas’ growing population all cranking up the A/C during the days’ hottest times — typically around 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., said Michael E. Webber, professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin.
“It’s hot, and it’s humid, and so the demand for air conditioning, and therefore electricity is spiking to record levels,” Webber told the San Antonio Report Thursday.
Texas continues to be one of the country’s fastest-growing states, having topped a population of 30 million earlier this year — only the second U.S. state to do so, behind California, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
That growth isn’t expected to slow down anytime soon.
Texas will likely continue to “bump up against” record-setting demand in the near future for a variety of reasons, Webber said, including economic growth and climate change.
Solar energy to the rescue
It’s worth noting, he said, how well the grid has kept up this summer. The reason is renewable power sources.
“One of the reasons is because of all the wind and solar we’ve built in the last few years, along with batteries and natural gas, but in particular, wind and solar — especially solar — has great alignment with our peak demand,” he said.
Webber explained that the many solar farms in West Texas see peak production around the same time people in Texas’ biggest cities start using more energy.
This is proof that having a diverse energy mix across the state is good for Texas, because several of the traditional power plants that rely on coal and natural gas have been breaking down in the heat, he said.
That shouldn’t mean Texans don’t try to conserve, Webber said. He wrote a recent op-ed published in the New York Times discussing how utilities and Texas residents could both benefit from utilities paying their customers to reduce their power use during peak hours.
These sorts of demand-response programs would help the state’s grid, he wrote.
The power of conservation
In San Antonio, CPS Energy already employs this strategy. The municipal utility has both a commercial and residential demand-response program, and the utility’s President and CEO Rudy Garza has called conservation one of the utility’s best new “sources” of energy.
“Conservation is still the best medicine,” Garza said during a June board meeting. “If customers are doing their part to not over-consume unnecessarily — to think about when they’re running things at home so that it’s outside the peak hours — then that just creates a little more cushion for everyone.”
Heat-related calls on the rise
The scorching heat is already being blamed for at least 13 deaths in Texas this year, although none have occurred locally.
A postal worker died in Dallas last month as the heat index reached 115 degrees, and a father and his teenage stepson died while hiking in Big Bend National Park earlier this summer.
At least 268 heat-related deaths were recorded in Texas last year — the highest annual toll for the state since at least 1999, according to data from the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Locally, the San Antonio Fire Department has received 343 heat-related calls for assistance since June 1, department spokesman Joe Arrington told the San Antonio Report. That’s up 14% from the 301 calls it saw over the same period last year.
