Summer outlook: How hot will it be and will the grid hold

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Meteorological summer begins June 1 and we're already talking about triple digit heat before our hottest season has even begun.

Summer heat

The seasonal outlook from the Climate Prediction Center points to high confidence that all of Texas and most of the lower 48 states will experience a warmer-than-normal summer.

The 30-year average number of triple-digit days per year in Austin at Camp Mabry is now up to 29 and the First Warning Weather Team expects we exceed that. Last year, we hit 100º or hotter 80 times, but we're not yet forecasting a repeat.

Here's the triple-digit predictions from the First Warning Weather Team:

Warming climate

Without a specific pattern to point to this summer, the Climate Prediction Center hedged a lot of its summer forecast (for June, July and August) on decadal trends, meaning: summers have been warming and they expect that trend to continue.

KXAN Meteorologist Kristen Currie looked into the trend of warming summers.

"The outlook doesn't look good, only because the trend is not our friend. We oftentimes look back at 2011 as the benchmark for the hottest summer a lot of us have ever endured. And in a lot of aspects it is," Currie said. "As it stands, it is the hottest summer on record here in Austin. But you look more recently, last summer followed as the second hottest, 2022 was the third hottest."

So with the expectation that climate change leaves its mark on our summer yet again, here's why that means things get hotter.

"With climate change, these patterns get stuck. It's hard to move the jet stream. It's hard to move these big bubbles of hot air," Currie added. "So we're starting to see not only more intense heat waves, but also these heat waves last for a longer period of time."

Texas grid expectations for 2024

With the population of Texas continuing to grow, and our summers getting hotter, it only makes sense that some are concerned about keeping the power, and the AC, on this summer.

In 2023 ERCOT issued 11 conservation appeals as grid conditions got tight. KXAN spoke with David Tuttle, Ph.D., a lecturer and research associate in the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin about his expectations for the grid this year.

"The problem will get solved more as more generation comes online, and that's happening," Tuttle said. "Since we had 11 alerts last year, or conservation calls, we'll probably have some this year. We've had a lot of new batteries and solar and some gas that have come online, so it might be less this coming summer. But, fundamentally, it all depends on the weather."

Our reliance on renewable energy to get through tight grid conditions continues to grow.

"The biggest additions have been utility-scale solar, those big solar farms that take many acres, and then batteries, and then some natural gas has come online," Tuttle explained. "Also, the dynamic that we're seeing is that solar resources has been excellent to power us through the heat of the day. But at the end of the day when the sun starts setting, we still have our air conditioners on and the wind hasn't yet started blowing because the wind tends to blow most at night and generate more power at night. There's this gap. And that's where the batteries come in, and or natural gas. And they can plug that gap."

Impacts of the heat

Of course, it's not just the Texas grid and your electricity use that get impacted when it's hot. There are other indirect impacts. The hotter and drier it is, the more water gets evaporated from our area lakes that serve as the water supply for Central Texas. The hotter and drier it is, the more our vegetation dries out and sets us up for wildfire danger when the humidity drops and the wind blows.

And, when the temperatures stay consistently over 100° in the afternoon with feels-like temperatures even hotter, that can pose a health danger for people overexerting themselves in the heat or those sensitive groups less tolerant of those temperatures.