NPR.

This is the indicator from planet money.

I'm Darren Woods.

And I'm Whalen Wong.

On a hot September day in 2023, the operators of Texas's power grid were getting nervous.

The warmth from an unusually hot summer was pushing later into the year.

That meant more air conditioners, more fans, and more staying inside.

But keeping up with that thirst for electricity was a scramble.

The sun was setting earlier as the summer gave way to fall,

and that meant less solar power in the evening. That day, the wind was forecast to be low,

so not much wind power just when people got home and turned on their ACs and TVs and ovens. Also,

a few power plants are out of commission.

Watching all of this was Stephanie Smith. She's the chief operating officer of Eulian, which is a

company that, among other things, builds battery plants in Texas.

It was just one of those perfect storms of events where a few went offline at the same time,

the DFW area. For Texans, the deadly winter blackouts from a couple years earlier were front of mind.

And the question that evening in September was, could Texas's grid batteries save the day this time?

So today in the second show from our grid battery trilogy, we're going to Texas.

Yesterday we looked at how the state of California was boosting batteries to encourage more wind and solar.

And today we go to an entirely different electricity market that is much less California control and much more

free market rodeo.

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