Energy Capital Podcast

How Texas decides which data centers to connect

ERCOT now has roughly 445 gigawatts of large loads asking to connect to the Texas grid, a figure so large that Joshua Rhodes says it might as well be infinite, because the system cannot physically build for all of it.To sort real projects from speculative ones, ERCOT is launching a new screening process called batch zero, and stakeholders voted to advance it at last week’s Technical Advisory Committee meeting. On this episode, Rhodes walks through the mechanics with Tiffany Wu, an energy markets and regulatory consultant at McAdams Energy Group and a former adviser to Public Utility Commissioner Will McAdams.The mechanism traces back to SB6, the 2025 law that standardized how large loads connect to the grid and set a 75-megawatt threshold for what counts as a large load. Wu describes a sequence built to thin the field at each step. ERCOT screens which projects qualify and studies what transmission they would require, then puts the survivors through a financial gate that filters out developers unwilling to commit real capital before final studies on whatever clears. The first batch is not expected to finish until late 2027.Running alongside the batch process is a fight over who pays for the transmission. PUC staff want to charge large loads based on their contracted peak capacity rather than the four coincident peaks that currently let flexible customers shave their bills. Wu says this shift would make much of the demand-response incentive evaporate.The episode explores:* How ERCOT separates base load projects already in the queue from those still being studied and allocated.* Why the shift from 4CP to a contracted-capacity charge changes who pays for transmission.* How loads can use ERCOT pathways to pull more power than their allocation while transmission gets built.ERCOT is moving to approve the framework now and tweak it as the first batch works through. (It’s the same build-it-in-motion approach ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas described on an earlier episode.) The vote sets the rules. The studies will decide who actually connects.Timestamps* 00:00 - Introduction & Tiffany Wu* 01:47 - Why SB6 Exists* 07:42 - Batch Zero Status* 10:03 - Who Gets Into Batch Zero* 16:49 - Financial Obligations and Commitment Gate* 22:44 - Batch Zero Study and Timeline* 27:49 - Load Estimates and Flexible Load Options* 31:37 - Transmission Build-Out and 765 kV Lines* 35:46 - Batch One and Future Batches* 37:43 - Transmission Cost Allocation and 4CP Reform* 46:43 - Reliability Standard StudyResourcesPeople & Organizations* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)* Webber Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn)* IdeaSmiths (Website - LinkedIn)* Tiffany Wu* McAdams Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn)Company & Industry News* ERCOT’s TAC Sends Batch Zero Guidelines to BoardBooks & Articles Discussed* Texas Senate Bill 6, 89th Legislature* PGRR145 - Batch Zero Process for Large Load Interconnections* NPRR1325 - Related to PGRR145, Batch Zero Process for Large Load Interconnections* PUC Project No. 58481 - Large Load Interconnection Standards RulemakingRelated Podcasts by Energy Capital* How Texas Plans to Serve ‘Infinite Demand’ with Eric Goff* Who Pays for the New Grid with Pablo Vegas* Is Texas Ready for Winter Now? with Will McAdamsRelated Posts by Texas Energy & Power* Energy Policymakers Grapple with Reliability, Fairness, and FlexibilityTranscriptJoshua Rhodes: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Energy Capital Podcast. I’m really excited to have Tiffany Wu here to talk more about what all is happening in ERCOT, particularly around SB6, large loads, transmission cost allocation, all of the hot topics right now. Tiffany Wu is an energy markets and regulatory consultant with McAdams Energy Group. And for more background with McAdams Energy Group, you can go back and listen to Matt Boms’s interview with Will McAdams just a couple months ago. So before working at McAdams Energy Group, Tiffany was a DOE Solar Energy Innovation Fellow and also an advisor to Will McAdams while he was a commissioner at the Public Utility Commission of Texas. But between that, also was a senior project manager at TEPRI, the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute, which is, I think we actually met. We had our first conversation when you were at TEPRI, and I was asking you questions about how these 9.9 megawatt batteries, what they were paying for electricity and how much they got paid for electricity, because that was a big deal for a while.Tiffany Wu: That’s right. Yeah, I remember that there are a lot of questions around whether or not those batteries which support the grid, whether or not we should be paying for some of those distribution level costs as transmission level costs. Yes.Joshua Rhodes: Yeah. Anyways, we probably won’t get into that, but we can leave that as a thing. But that was super helpful back then. Thanks. And I know you you also spent 10 years with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as a process engineer, commissioning engineer. I’m really excited to have another engineer on this podcast. That’s kind of rare, to be honest. Well, thank you. You got your BS and chemical engineering at UT Austin before getting your masters at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. So Tiffany Wu, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.Tiffany Wu: Thank you. Thanks for having me.Joshua Rhodes: Yeah. So the day we’re recording this podcast, we we just released a podcast with Eric Goff where we talked we hit on some broad topics around how ERCOT policy is made. And we talked a lot about the large load process. I’d encourage folks to kind of maybe listen to that podcast first in terms of like kind of setting the broader goal. But with this one, I think I’d like to get a little bit deeper in this conversation around some of the intricacies of the process, kind of where it’s at. And to be fair, this kind of fits in my teaching philosophy of any time I give a lecture, I try to say the same thing three times in three different ways as a way of like some people learn one way versus the other way. So there will be some overlap between this and and the podcast with Eric, but I still think there’s so much there that I think this is gonna be, I think we need to be having a lot of conversations around this. But we’re gonna get deeper into some of these things. But let’s start bigger picture, maybe for folks who haven’t had the one with Eric. So The whole reason we’re having this conversation about large loads and batch zero and transmission cost allocations based on SB6 or Senate Bill 6. Can you lay out what problems Senate Bill 6 was looking to solve and kind of how the batch zero process, you know, fits into that effort?Tiffany Wu: Yeah, sure. So Senate Bill 6 is trying to balance a few different things. So previously in ERCOT, most of the large loads were coming from the cryptocurrency industry. It wasn’t until recently that more of the data centers have been looking for interconnection into ERCOT. So historically, the way that you would connect into the system is you would go and talk to your transmission provider or your distribution provider and ask them, hey, I want to set up a business. Can I connect to the electricity system? And they would figure it out. But because there are so many loads coming in now, there was some concern that with the size. Historically they were working on one project at a time and TSPs were conducting the studies, but ERCOT started to see that there may be a reliability issue with how many loads are coming onto the system and how big each of these loads are. The other issue is that with the cryptocurrency miners, you may remember that a lot of people were worried that they were not paying transmission costs because the way that we paid transmission costs historically is based off of the four coincident peaks during the summertime. And so if you’re able to avoid that, then you don’t have to pay t...

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How Texas plans to serve ‘infinite demand’

2w ago00:43:03Tap to summarize

Texas has spent decades building transmission to serve load growth. The pattern worked when growth rose steadily with new homes, oil and gas operations, and the gradual expansion of the state’s industrial base. It is being tested by a different kind of customer: data centers requesting interconnection at a scale that exceeds what the grid can physically deliver.Eric Goff, founder of Goff Policy and a long-time participant in the ERCOT stakeholder process, walks through how the system is adapting. The current large load queue sits above 400 gigawatts, a number Goff describes as effectively infinite because the constraint is infrastructure, not demand.In an interview with host Joshua Rhodes, Eric covers a lot of ground, including:* How the batch zero policy, now working its way through ERCOT governance, would replace one-off utility studies with a single, system-wide study and a constructable transmission plan.* How the decision to build 765 kV transmission compares to the 138 and 345 kV shifts of past generations.* How Senate Bill 6 gave ERCOT and utilities multiple tools to disconnect large loads before emergencies.* Why artificial intelligence hyperscalers behave differently than the crypto miners that came before them, with a value-of-lost-load above the wholesale price cap.* Whether a minimum transmission charge can protect existing rate payers as new load arrives.Goff argues the infrastructure decisions Texas makes now will determine whether the data center build-out lowers per-unit costs for everyone or shifts them onto residential consumers.Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.Timestamps* 00:00 - Introduction & Eric Goff* 02:36 - How Policy Gets Made in ERCOT* 06:35 - What’s Actually Driving Load Growth* 09:18 - Is the 435 GW Queue Real?* 10:41 - Inside the Batch Zero Process* 14:21 - Building Transmission for Load, Not Generation* 16:56 - Large Load Flexibility and Controllable Load* 18:18 - SB6 and the Power to Curtail* 22:38 - The Dispatchable Campus Idea* 27:27 - Does Transmission Planning Need to Change?* 32:32 - Paying for Transmission: 4CP, 12CP, and a Minimum Charge* 39:39 - Five Years Out: Betting on InfrastructureResourcesPeople & Organizations* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)* Webber Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn)* IdeaSmiths (Website - LinkedIn)* Eric Goff (LinkedIn)* Goff Policy (Website - LinkedIn)Company & Industry News* ERCOT files Planning Guide Revision Request 145 for Batch Zero* ERCOT Board approves $9.4B 765-kV Eastern Backbone project (RTO Insider)* PUCT approves first 765-kV transmission lines in ERCOT region* Texas lawmakers push back on 765-kV transmission plan (KXAN)Books & Articles Discussed* Texas Senate Bill 6, 89th Legislature* ERCOT Planning Guide Revision Request 145, Batch Zero Process for Large Load Interconnections* ERCOT Permian Basin Reliability Plan Study* PJM proposal to transition away from capacity marketRelated Podcasts by Energy Capital* The New Rules Behind ERCOT Prices, with Andrew Reimers* Texas Growth Running Into Grid Limits, with Katie Coleman* The Data Behind Texas Reliability, with Max KanterTranscriptTHE ENERGY CAPITAL PODCAST Eric Goff, Founder of Goff Policy Host: Joshua RhodesJoshua Rhodes: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Energy Capital Podcast. I’m really excited to have Eric Goff, the founder of Goff Policy here, to basically tell us how ERCOT works. Eric is one of the smartest people out there when it comes to kind of the current comings and goings in and around ERCOT. Deeply involved in a lot of the policy and a lot of the procedures and a lot of other things happening. Eric founded Goff Policy in 2019. Before that, he had seven years at Citigroup in energy trading, market operations, earlier roles at NRG Energy and Reliant and Constellation. He’s been a longtime participant in the ERCOT stakeholder governance system. He serves as past chair of multiple ERCOT subcommittees and working groups and up until just recently served as a sole representative for Texas residential consumers at the ERCOT Technical Advisory Committee appointed by the Office of Public Utility Counsel. The firm has grown significantly in the past couple of years. You’ve been spreading into Western markets. You’ve been hosting symposiums and all kinds of things. Eric, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.Eric Goff: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. I appreciate the invitation.Joshua Rhodes: Yeah, no, absolutely. So as I do with most people when I’m going through their LinkedIn before talking, I actually came across something I did not know about you is that did you really co-found compost peddlers?Eric Goff: I did with my friend Dustin Fedakko.Joshua Rhodes: Okay, so I don’t know if we’ve talked about this. Maybe we have. I was in East Austin at around that time and I saw your guys, maybe you, I don’t know, like riding these modified cargo bikes with basically blue barrels carrying compost around. Was that you?Eric Goff: That’s right. That was us. We had, we called everyone the peddler. And I did some of the compost shifts, but we had part-time and full-time peddlers and launched it before we had municipal composting in Austin. And I think that maybe the best thing to say is that we accelerated the city’s own plans to municipal composting.Joshua Rhodes: Right, right, right. It was just funny. Just, remember one time thinking, and this was also with like PediCab folks around that time before like e-bikes really kind of made it into where they’re the most fit people in the world riding tens of miles a day carrying heavy loads. It was insane.Eric Goff: Yeah. Some of the hard part too is because it’s just pure literally inertia with another maybe grid thing, but you have to stop the bike and start the bike and stop the bike and start the bike with many, many pounds of compost in that barrel.Joshua Rhodes: It was insane. All right. So I’ve already burned enough of our precious time talking about, but inertia is a good tie in. We’re going to get to the grid. So Eric, you do a lot of policy, a lot of policy consulting, a lot of policy work in ERCOT. For folks that either don’t live inside the ERCOT stakeholder world, which is the vast majority of people on this planet, how does policy actually get made in ERCOT? Where does it start and where does it continue?Eric Goff: Sure. It’s a unique system that doesn’t exist in many other locations. And it’s changed some. I’m sure we’ll get into that since Winter Storm Uri happened. Historically, the energy companies in Texas, going back to the 90s at least, I wasn’t in the business then, so I’ve been told, were active in working together to establish what ERCOT would be and do. And they established this stakeholder process. At the time, it had a stakeholder board and it operated by having like a balance and continues to have a balanced group of buyers and sellers that many recommendations at the time of decisions. And if anyone doesn’t like something, you can appeal that to the public utility commission. But the process drives consensus because you have to get along long-term with your peers. Right. And so many things don’t end up being appealed to th...

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Austin Energy Enters the Next Phase of Decarbonization

3w ago00:41:28Tap to summarize

Austin Energy’s power generation hit the 65 percent carbon-free level in 2024, and the municipal utility is targeting 100 percent carbon-free load by 2035, one of the most aggressive clean energy targets of any utility in Texas.Austin Energy is one of the largest municipally owned utilities in the country and one of the few vertically integrated utilities operating inside ERCOT’s deregulated market. As the utility plans for load growth and rising ERCOT market exposure, it is also preparing the community to weigh the trade-offs that entails.In this episode, Joshua Rhodes speaks with Stuart Reilly, general manager of Austin Energy, and Lisa Martin, the utility’s chief operating officer. Reilly and Martin walk through how the muni model shapes new load evaluation, renewable contract structure, and community engagement. They describe a resource plan that combines local generation with utility-scale batteries, distributed energy deals, transmission upgrades, and demand response.Joshua, Stuart, and Lisa discuss topics including:* What it means to operate as a vertically integrated muni inside ERCOT’s competitive market.* The 500 megawatts of plausible new load Austin Energy is planning for, and why most of it is not data centers.* How load zone price separation has changed the hedging value of distant renewable power purchase agreements.* Why the resource plan calls for new local generation alongside more clean energy procurement.* A new 100 MW battery deal with Jupiter Power and a 40 MW distributed deal with Base Power.* How the utility returned over $100 million to customers from Winter Storm Uri.* How Austin Energy communicates reliability, affordability, and clean energy trade-offs with its community.Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.Timestamps* 00:00 - Intro, Stuart Reilly and Lisa Martin* 01:11 - Austin Energy as a Non-Opt-In Utility* 05:47 - Planning for Load Growth, Why Gas Peakers* 09:25 - Sizing Real Load vs the ERCOT Forecast* 10:49 - New Loads, New Costs, Who Pays* 12:13 - Load Zone Separation, Explained* 14:02 - Decker Retirements and Local Generation* 16:51 - PPAs, Hedges, and the $850 Problem* 18:26 - How a Gas Peaker Fits a Carbon-Free Goal* 23:53 - Why Local Power Enables More Renewables* 26:43 - Communicating Complexity to Customers* 31:19 - Jupiter Power, Base Power, and Local Storage* 36:08 - Distributed Batteries and Distribution Costs* 40:25 - Closing Thanks and OutroResourcesPeople & Organizations* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)* Webber Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn)* IdeaSmiths (Website - LinkedIn)* Stuart Reilly (LinkedIn)* Lisa Martin (LinkedIn)* Austin Energy (Website - Executive Leadership Team)* Other Oganizations Mentioned* ERCOT (Website)* Jupiter Power (Website)* Base Power (Website)Company & Industry News* Austin Energy signs Battery Storage Deal, Advancing Climate and Reliability Goals* Austin expands renewable energy push with major solar generation investments - Community Impact* Texas grid operator’s demand forecast likely an overestimate - Texas Tribune* Austin Energy 2035 plan sees challenges and successes one year after adoption - KXANBooks, Articles & Reports Discussed* Austin Energy Resource, Generation and Climate Protection Plan to 2035* ERCOT Preliminary Long-Term Load Forecast 2026–2032* Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) Pilot ProjectRelated Podcasts by Energy Capital* All Energy Capital Podcasts* Texas Growth Is Running Into Power Grid Limits with Katie Coleman* Who Pays for the New Grid with Pablo Vegas* Creating a Distributed Battery Network with Zach DellRelated Posts by Texas Energy & Power* Process is Killing Texas Data Center Projects* Transmission Takes a Decade, Load Doesn’t — with Raina HornadayTranscriptJoshua Rhodes: Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of the Energy Capital Podcast. I’ve got not one but two guests for you today, both from the C-suite of Austin Energy, one of the largest municipal utilities in the country. It actually ranks as the eighth largest publicly owned electric utility in the U.S. And it serves about a million folks in the greater city of Austin. So today we’re going to be talking to Stuart Reilly, who’s a current general manager of Austin Energy. Stuart has spent about 20 years in service of the city of Austin, starting as assistant city attorney, before moving up to various roles at Austin Energy. Lisa Martin is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Austin Energy, but she’s also spent times before at SoCal Edison, going through energy supplies and contracts and other types of things. And also from her LinkedIn, found out that she had something to do with subsea surveillance at Shell, which I actually want to just throw out all of the questions I have for you guys and focus just in on that. So sorry, Stuart, if we don’t talk about anything that we were going to talk about, but having found this out today. I’m really excited to have both of you all here to talk about Austin Energy. So Stuart and Lisa, welcome to Energy Capital Podcast.Stuart Reilly: Thanks Josh.Lisa Martin: Thank you, glad to be here.Joshua Rhodes: So in this podcast, we talk a lot about energy. We talk a lot about Texas energy. And a lot of times when we’re talking about ERCOT, we’re talking about the competitive regions of the system. And most electricity meters in the state of Texas are in kind of the power to choose region. But there are some parts of the states that are different, one being Austin Energy, the other being the City Public Service of San Antonio. And a lot of the co-ops are actually these things called non-optin entities. Stuart, can you explain kind of what those are and kind of how Austin Energy fits in the energy mix in ERCOT and in Texas.Stuart Reilly: Yeah, absolutely. And Austin Energy has been around since 1895. Like you mentioned, we serve about a million residents, 580,000 customer accounts, homes and businesses. Not just in the city of Austin, but kind of in the Travis County region, we serve 11 other cities in our area and unincorporated areas of Travis County. Currently the third largest municipally owned utility, but operating in the ERCOT market as a non-optin entity. So because our history kind of goes back to this 1895 period when investor owned utilities didn’t want to come to Austin, our city decided to start this journey on its own, build a dam, build a powerhouse that served as the first street lighting system, the moonlight towers that we still have here in Austin. Even as the market evolved and even after the competitive market in Texas and ERCOT came to be, we still operate as vertically integrated utilities. So we still have generation, transmission, distribution, and retail customers. And we do all of the customer service functions for...

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Process is Killing Texas Data Center Projects

4w ago00:42:01Tap to summarize

As the data center buildout in Texas accelerates, the public conversation has fixated on generation, interconnection queues, and gigawatts. But the firms actually structuring these deals see a different problem entirely: process.In this episode, Joshua Rhodes speaks with Maura Yates, chief executive of Mothership Energy. Mothership is one of the most active retail electricity providers in ERCOT’s large-load market, managing more than three gigawatts of large load and writing more than 39 distinct data center contract templates to handle the variation across deals.Yates says the technology to power data centers exists. The bottleneck for data center completion is the time it takes to sign contracts for electricity service and the time it takes to connect them to the grid. As Texas debates SB6 implementation, co-location rules, and demand-side management, that distinction is shaping which projects get built and when.Joshua and Maura discuss topics including:* Why Mothership has written more than 39 distinct data center contract templates.* The difference between behind-the-meter, front-of-meter, and co-location deals.* What the Crusoe Goodnight data center PUC ruling means for future co-location projects.* Why most data centers are data center companies, not power companies.* HowYates expects ERCOT to integrate large load without pushing costs onto residential customers.Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.Timestamps* 00:00 - Introduction & Maura Yates* 01:26 - Building Mothership from Both Sides of the Market* 03:27 - The Problem Mothership Was Created to Solve* 05:51 - White Label REP Model and Getting DERs into ERCOT* 08:37 - Option One vs. Option Two Retail Licenses* 10:42 - Selling the Residential Book and Pivoting to Large Loads* 13:27 - Entering the Data Center and Bitcoin Mining Space* 16:24 - How Mothership Structures Data Center Deals* 19:13 - What the Market Needs: Process Over Technology* 21:24 - Co-location, Net Metering, and BYOG in ERCOT* 26:13 - Do Data Centers Actually Want to Be Power Companies* 28:12 - Eclipse: Mothership’s Market Access Platform* 32:01 - Forward Curves and Empowering Price Takers* 38:07 - The Grid’s Future: Distributed Supply and Data Center Growth* 41:03 - ClosingResourcesPeople & Organizations* Maura Yates (LinkedIn)* Mothership Energy (Website - LinkedIn)* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)* Webber Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn)* IdeaSmiths (Website - LinkedIn)Company & Industry News* Mothership Energy and Atlantic Energy Complete Texas Customer TransferRelated Podcasts by Energy Capital* “The Name of the Game is Flexibility,” a Conversation with ERCOT’s Pablo VegasTranscriptJoshua Rhodes: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Energy Capital podcast. I’m really excited to have Maura Yates here to talk about Mothership Energy in ERCOT. Maura Yates has over 20 years of experience in the power industry, starting in distributed energy resources at Arizona Public Service before moving to governmental affairs at Sun Edison and then becoming VP of sustainability at MP2 Energy, which was bought by Shell in 2017. In 2021, Maura co-founded and is the CEO of Mothership Energy Innovations with her business partner, Caitlin Brammer. Mothership is the 18th largest retail electricity provider in the nation and is contracted and manages over three gigawatts of large loads in ERCOT. In addition to being a rep, Mothership provides risk management, technology and consulting services to electric cooperatives in Texas and specializes in data center and wholesale procurement. Yates, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.Maura Yates: Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here chatting with you all.Joshua Rhodes: Yeah, and we’re again, super excited to have you. Before we dig into mothership and your current role, like looking back kind of where you’ve come from, your LinkedIn started in a regulated electricity space at Arizona Public Service before kind of going into more corporate with Sun Edison and MP2 and Shell. And now you’re CEO of like a company in the really competitive space. How were those different, those roles that you have in the different spaces where theyMaura Yates: That’s a really good question and it’s one I enjoy answering because ultimately it’s that background that has allowed us to create incubator Mothership Innovations to be the shop that it is. So when you look at the places, I’ve spent time at the utilities, I spent time at the development side, both a DER and large scale solar development shop, all the way then to a deregulated pseudo rep slash utility in ERCOT. And really just bounce back and forth from utility side. To developer or industry side, back to a version of the utility, back to the industry side. And now I’m back on quote unquote the utility side or the delivery side and supply side. And where we’ve landed with Mothership is really taking the learnings of participating and being a part of a company on both sides of the transactions, right? So you typically have the utility on one side and the developer on the other side. And so by jockeying back and forth between these spaces, between our regulated utility all the way into the deregulated market, it’s given us a really well-rounded understanding of how these different parties participate in the market, but also really what they find important and what they find valuable and like, what is it that the utility is trying to get out of transactions? What is it the developer is trying to get out of transaction? And when you better understand both sides of a transaction, you’re able to come up with a better solution for the transaction. Which is why, again, we’ve developed mothership in its latest stage to really be this deal shop and this service provider for both developers and other load serving entities and utility providers. And I should clarify, I’m using utility and like not the traditional ERCOT sense of TND, but really the one providing and servicing power to the end user.Joshua Rhodes: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Like, can you kind of tease out a little bit like of that? I seeing both sides of kind of how things operate is super valuable. So as you were seeing both sides, can you kind of tease out what was the problem that mothership was originally created to solve? Talked about both sides, but what was that problem there?Maura Yates: Yep. So the more time that we spent on both sides of these deals. So for example, I go back all the way to Arizona Public Service when we structured some of the first utility incentive programs and we were very aggressive, like in a very solar friendly way in terms of the incentives we were offering. So we worked really closely with the industry and the solar and battery developers. And our goal there was to better understand what is it that gets you to transact, right? Like if our goal as the utility was to get solar adopted by homeowners, what is it that the solar homeowners need to adopt? And what is it we as the utility then need to provide to enable this transaction? And we did a good job. Typically the utility or the load serving entities role is to provide some form of incentives and compensation. And we did that and we had success. We deployed a lot of projects, but incentives aren’t the most sustainable mechanism for growing an industry. So you have to continue to find value and way to extract value as you move away from incentives as the technologies become more competitive. When you start moving down the advancement and the maturity continuum, you start to realize that the challenge in getting these technologies deployed from both sides is really the customer experience. Something has to change in the customer experience. Everybody talks about it, both utility talked about the customer experience and the developer talked about the customer experience. But they talked about it differently and it’s the same customer. So our point was this customer is facing a very bifurcated customer experience. They would get a bill from their solar developer. They’d get a bill from their retailer. They said that solar developers sold them on one thing, but then when they got this bill, they can’t make sense of it. They’re speaking two different languages. And then all of sudden you have a bad customer experience and the customer’s not ...

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Texas Bets on Speed, with Gin Kinney

Apr 2900:48:18Tap to summarize

Texas generators and grid operators used to spend a decade or two planning for new power plants.But as Gin Kinney, chief administrative officer at NRG Energy, told Energy Capital Podcast hosts Matt Boms and Josh Rhodes at CERAweek in Houston this year, the company’s planning horizon has collapsed to 12-18 months.The company’s activity reflects the dynamic growth of the ERCOT grid. Kinney said NRG has sourced 5.4 gigawatts of natural gas turbines, secured a labor arrangement with the construction company Kiewit, and begun construction on three gas plants funded in part through the Texas Energy Fund.ERCOT’s demand forecasts, which should inform the plans of developers such as NRG, have been hard to pin down at best. Yet while no one can say for sure how much of the new load is actually coming to Texas, it’s clear that demand is going to rise substantially and very quickly. That’s why, as Gin explained, NRG is focused on the assets, not the timeline of the load they’ll serve.This rapid growth means grid connection — speed to power — has never been more important. In this episode, Josh describes a 350-megawatt data center going up near El Paso, outside of ERCOT, that’s being powered by roughly 800 small generators — because larger generation units weren’t available on the data center’s construction timeline.Such behind-the-meter, bring-your-own-power projects are what happens when speed-to-power is a grid’s binding constraint.They also show the vital importance of load flexibility. Every megawatt of flexible load is a megawatt of generation that does not have to be built, financed, or fought over. In this episode, Gin discusses NRG’s work on virtual power plants and new hyperscaler contracts as steps toward a more flexible grid.The question is how to scale such efforts. This episode points to ways that grid participants are working to answer it.Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.Timestamps* 00:00 - Introduction & Gin Kinney* 04:42 - NRG’s One-Gigawatt Virtual Power Plant* 06:07 - Affordability, T&D Costs, and the Smart Home Strategy* 09:09 - How NRG Uses AI in Operations and the Home* 12:49 - Texas Market Outlook and Speed of Development* 20:07 - Texas Energy Fund and NRG’s Construction Progress* 21:06 - Hyperscalers, Bring Your Own Power, and Community Investment* 27:41 - Post-Conversation: VPP Mechanics and the Gentailer Difference* 34:13 - Load Growth Numbers and What Is Actually Real* 38:57 - Data Centers, Bridge Power, and Speed to Grid* 42:39 - SB6, Legislative Hearings, and Who Should Set the RulesResourcesGuest, Host, and Organizations* Gin Kinney (NRG Profile)* NRG Energy (Website)* Reliant (Website)* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)* Webber Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn)* IdeaSmiths (Website - LinkedIn)* Matt Boms (LinkedIn)* Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance (Website)Organizations & Individuals Mentioned* Pablo Vegas (LinkedIn)* ERCOT (Website)* ERCOT ADER Pilot Program (Website)* ERCOT Long-Term Load Forecast (Website)* Public Utility Commission of Texas (Website)* Texas Energy Fund (Website)* SB6 Implementation Rulemaking, Project No. 58317 (Website)* Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy (Website)* CERAWeek by S&P Global (Website)Company & Industry News* NRG Energy Completes Acquisition of 13 GW of Power Generation and C&I VPP Portfolio from LS Power* Sunrun and NRG Energy Announce Partnership to Harness the Power of Distributed Energy in Texas* ERCOT’s Large Load Queue Jumped Almost 300% Last Year* NRG Completes Acquisition of Vivint Smart HomeRelated Podcasts by Energy Capital* NRG’s Gigawatt VPP in Texas with Travis Kavulla* Who Pays for the New Grid with Pablo Vegas* Who Pays for Texas Grid Growth — Roundtable DiscussionRelated Posts by Texas Energy & Power* More Power that’s Faster and Fairer — Roundtable Discussion* Connecting the Regulatory Dots Shaping Texas EnergyTranscriptMatt Boms: So we are here live at CERAweek in Houston, Texas, and we have a very special guest with us today. Gin Kinney is Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer at NRG Energy, where she leads marketing, communications, and customer experience. She brings more than 20 years of experience, including over a decade in the energy sector, and has played a key role in building NRG’s brand and shaping a more customer-focused digitally driven organization. She’s also active in industry and community leadership with a focus on sustainability and advancing women and energy. Gin, thanks so much for joining us today.Gin Kinney: Hey, thank you. It’s great to be here.Joshua Rhodes: Yeah, so one of the things from your background is you really came from renewable energy development before joining NRG. How is that path shaped like your role or what you see your role is at NRG?Gin Kinney: Coming from a startup environment to a comparative behemoth, right? You definitely learn a lot on the fly in the entrepreneurial world. You definitely learn how to be scrappy, have a lot of grit, say yes a lot to challenges. You also learn how to manage things at a different scale, be really close to the customer. And I think also coming from that entrepreneurial world where you’re working on project finance or you’re working on project development, well, this is how we’ve always done it before. And so I try to bring that mindset to NRG where we’re much larger, but the excuse of we’re not going to change or we’re going to, instead of innovate or sort of take chances, we’re going to protect the status quo. I think the other piece of that too is this competitive nature. When you’re a startup or you’re entrepreneurial, you’re competing every day for dollars. You’re competing for space, you’re competing for customers. And when you have this highly competitive spirit, you’re always playing to win. And that’s what we try to bring to NRG too, is that play to win, not protect the status quo.Joshua Rhodes: You think that fits better in Texas with other places given like the competitive nature of like the generation market in the retail space you operate in?Gin Kinney: Texas certainly provides us the opportunity to move fast. Policy and regulators clear the pathway to get things done, get things built. And in Texas, in the competitive market...

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Transmission Takes a Decade, Load Doesn't — with Raina Hornaday

Apr 2200:37:40Tap to summarize

ERCOT’s all-time demand record is 85.5 gigawatts. Yet by the end of last year, the grid manager’s interconnection queue included 432 gigawatts of generation requests. ERCOT also received 225 gigawatts-worth of new large load requests last year.The critical factor connecting the two: transmission lines. But the transmission improvements that would accommodate such dramatic grid growth aren’t growing nearly as fast. In a conversation with Energy Capital Podcast host Micalah Spenrath, renewable energy veteran Raina Hornaday describes transmission as a planning and construction constraint that load growth is no longer willing to wait for.Raina has developed more than a gigawatt of renewable energy across Texas over the past 20 years. She founded Caprock Renewables and Fortress Microgrid, overseeing the creation of both utility-scale and distributed generation resources.In this episode, she describes a shift in how generation and load projects are being created: she calls it, “the energization of land.”She and Micalah also discuss how transmission lead times are prompting distributed generation resources to grow quickly, even as utility-scale solar continues to boom, and how institutional knowledge is moving from utilities to private developers, reshaping project delivery.Raina also credits battery storage resources added in the past five years for easing the price volatility that used to define ERCOT’s energy market. She says market adjustments made in the past five months have created a tailwind for storage projects.And she and Micalah discuss Senate Bill 819, a measure filed in the last legislative session that would have imposed strict siting requirements on renewables projects and likely hobbled Texas’s nation-leading renewables industry. While the bill drew widespread opposition and ultimately died, Raina expects a similar proposal to be filed again in next year’s legislative session.She says education — about the tax base that renewables create for rural communities, the revenue that renewable energy projects offer landowners, and the workforce they create across the state — is key, both for blocking anti-energy proposals and propelling the state’s economic and energy future.Timestamps* 00:00 - Introduction & Raina Hornaday* 00:54 - Caprock Origins: Family, Wind, and the Met Tower* 03:52 - Why South Texas for Utility-Scale Solar* 05:36 - The Landowner Pitch and Family Legacy* 09:06 - Boutique Developer in a Shifting Policy Landscape* 13:00 - Education, Powerhouse Texas, and American Farmland Trust* 16:14 - Agrivoltaics and Solar Sheep as a Growing Industry* 17:29 - ERCOT Interconnection Bottlenecks* 20:57 - SB 819, Tariffs, and Real-Time Co-Optimization* 23:21 - Testimony, Schools, and the Workforce Pipeline* 28:55 - Distributed Batteries and Storage Economics After Uri* 32:18 - Why Battery Projects Get Canceled* 34:22 - What Texas Needs Next: Flexibility and Distributed Generation* 36:50 - Closing ThoughtsResourcesGuest & Org* Raina Hornaday (LinkedIn)* Caprock Renewables (Website - LinkedIn)* CleanTX - Raina Hornaday Board ProfileOrganizations Discussed* ERCOT* Public Utility Commission of Texas* American Farmland Trust - Texas Smart Solar* PowerHouse Texas* CleanTX* Texas A&M AgriLife Extension* Texas Tech University - Energy Commerce and Renewable EnergyCompany & Industry News* ERCOT’s large load queue jumped almost 300% last year - Utility Dive* ERCOT Goes Live with Real-Time Co-optimization Plus Batteries* ERCOT’s large load queue has nearly quadrupled in a single year - Latitude Media* ERCOT Announces Strategic Organizational Changes to Support Grid ReliabilityBooks & Articles Discussed* The Economic Impact of Renewable Energy and Energy Storage Investments Across Texas - Joshua Rhodes, IdeaSmiths* Texas Renewables Interactive Map - txrenewables.net* Supporting Expansion of Agrivoltaics Using Smart Solar Principles - Southern SARE Grant* Texas Senate Bill 819 - 89th LegislatureRelated Posts by Texas Energy & Power* Texas Power Rush* It’s a Transition and an Expansion* Flexibility Driving Reliability and Affordability with Matt BomsTranscriptMicalah Spenrath: Hi everybody and welcome back to the Energy Capital Podcast. I’m your host, Micalah. And today I have with me Raina Hornaday, who is a veteran renewable energy developer with over 20 years of experience advancing the energy transition across Texas, bringing more than one gigawatt of renewable energy projects into commercial operation. As the founder and co-owner of Caprock Renewables and Fortress Microgrid and Caprock DLE, a direct lithium extraction venture developed in partnership with Texas Tech University, Raina leads the development of distributed solar generation storage and microgrid infrastructure across the state. Super excited to have you on the podcast, Raina, and we’ll hop right in. So in case I missed anything in your intro, give us a quick introduction to your work and Caprock Renewables in general.Raina Hornaday: Thank you so much for having me. This is one of my favorite podcasts of all time. So I’m really thankful to be a guest today. Caprock Renewables came from very kind of homegrown roots. My family homesteaded in Eastern New Mexico, 1906. And my dad started Caprock Farms in the seventies. His dad and his grandfather farmed dryland wheat farm, milo, things like that on the high plains of Eastern New Mexico. Starting in 1906 and then until my dad passed away a couple years ago, but he farmed his whole life and was a diehard farmer and loved the land. And he also was the executive director of Eastern Plains Council of Governments. And that gave him the opportunity to put up a small Met Tower on our edge of our farm, which is where the Caprock name comes from. It is the Caprock. There’s lots of Caprocks. It’s not the only Caprock. There’s a town in Texas called Caprock. But we had Caprock Farms and ranches. He put up the Met Tower. He and I would go get the chip, mail it to California, and we retained that data. And I took it to the Renewable Energy Roundup, which is a precursor of CleanTX, a TREIA. It was a TREIA event that was held in Fredericksburg, which I loved so much. And I think it was 2001. And I met with lots of folks there — rainwater catchment folks, but renewable developers. And that’s how the Caprock Wind project that is right there between our farm and ranch in Eastern New Mexico was born. So that project lived its life 20 years. It was decommissioned by Leeward Energy and repowered next door with the same substation. So that’s where Caprock Renewables got its name. I founded it 10 years ago and the goal was to do utility scale solar. We did 150, 200, and 300 megawatt projects in Texas. And during that time, that was really when the utility scale solar assets were being built out in Texas. And I had done this with wind, so it was really interesting to see how similar it was. But these, as you know, people from all over the world, the biggest companies come to do business in renewables in Texas. It’s just the best market. It’s kind of the easiest market, energy only. And so I’m a small developer, boutique shop. Then I started Fortress Microgrid to kind of see how the microgrid industry needs could be met and ended up doing small agrivoltaic projects in the Valley. And so I have one of the biggest projects and then I think one of the smalles...

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What a Wind Lease Is Worth Now with Rod Wetsel

Apr 1500:40:12Tap to summarize

In 1999, a rancher walked into a Sweetwater, Texas law office with a 50-page wind lease from landmen in South Dakota. The lawyer, an oil and gas attorney named Rod Wetsel, told him to throw it in the trash. The rancher insisted he take another look.That lease became the first of an estimated 10,000 that Wetsel and his firm would negotiate across Texas. At one point, the line of landowners waiting to get into his office stretched two blocks down the street.Wetsel is a founding partner at Wetsel & Lederle, co-author of the first treatise on Texas wind law, and a recipient of the Ernest E. Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Journal of Oil, Gas and Energy Law. He teaches wind law at Texas Tech University. On this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, Wetsel talks with host Joshua Rhodes about how wind, solar, and data center development changed Nolan County and the surrounding region.In Nolan County, where Sweetwater is located in West Texas, the tax base grew from around $500million in 1999 to $2.7 billion in 2024. County commissioners who once debated whether they could afford to cut the grass now fund new schools with turf football stadiums. Young people are moving back to towns that had been losing working-age residents for generations.Wetsel explains what makes a lease work for landowners, how townhall-style group negotiations give ranchers bargaining power against developers, and what data center companies are paying for land. He describes how electricity transmission lines, built more than a decade ago, added 18,000 megawatts of power generation capacity and enabled a wave of new energy projects across the region. And he shows why the Permian Reliability Project — a new transmission initiative that’s now in the siting phase — is poised to do the same for solar in far West Texas.Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.Timestamps* 00:00 - Introduction and Rod Wetzel* 00:52 - How an Oil and Gas Lawyer Found Wind* 03:08 - The First Wind Lease vs. an Oil and Gas Lease* 04:47 - Ten Thousand Leases and the Town Hall Model* 07:20 - What Landowners Fear About Wind Development* 08:24 - What a Wind Turbine Actually Pays a Rancher* 11:50 - Solar, Storage, and Data Center Leases* 12:33 - What Makes a Good Lease* 14:36 - Hybrid Projects and Triple Landowner Income* 17:42 - When Lease Negotiations Break Down* 19:24 - How the CREZ Lines Transformed West Texas* 22:57 - Who Wants Development and Who Doesn’t* 27:29 - Tax Base, Schools, and Rural Revitalization* 31:17 - The Bar and the Workforce Boom* 34:30 - What This Industry Looks Like in Ten Years* 37:13 - Australia, Global Parallels, and ClosingResourcesPeople & Organizations* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)* Webber Energy Group (Website)* IdeaSmiths (Website)* Energy Capital (Website - LinkedIn - YouTube)* Texas Energy & Power (Substack)* Rod Wetsel (Firm Bio)* Wetsel & Lederle, LLP (Website)* Texas Tech University School of Law (Website)* RWE (Americas Website)* ERCOT (Website)Company & Industry News* Texas OKs Permian Basin Reliability Plan, Option for State’s First 765-kV Transmission Lines* AEP Texas Set to Construct One of the First 765-kV Transmission Lines in Texas* Texas CREZ Lines: How Stakeholders Shape Major Energy Infrastructure ProjectsBooks & Articles Discussed* Wind and Solar Law by Roderick E. Wetsel and Becky H. DiffenTranscriptJoshua Rhodes: Hey everyone. I’m really excited today to have Rod Wetsel on the podcast to talk about the work he does as a clean energy lawyer. Rod is a founding partner of the law firm Wetsel & Lederle and based in Sweetwater, Texas, where he’s practiced law for over 36 years. He’s received the Ernest E. Smith Lifetime Achievement Award in Energy Law. He got his BA and JD from UT Austin and he’s previously taught law at the University of Texas at Austin and he currently teaches law at Texas Tech. In 2011, Mr. Wetsel co-authored the first treatise on Texas wind law and really has been someone who has helped write the legal playbook for how wind has developed in the state. Rod Wetsel, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.Rod Wetsel: Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me today.Joshua Rhodes: I just really wanted to kind of start off talking about, I’m not a lawyer, but I know in Texas, like a lot of laws based around energy law and particularly oil and gas law. So how did you get pulled into being basically the go-to lawyer for wind law in this state?Rod Wetsel: Well, that’s actually a pretty interesting story. I had practiced all kinds of law because we were in a general practice here in Sweetwater. But primarily for the 25 years before wind came along in about 1999, I had primarily been an oil and gas lawyer. And I’d heard rumors about wind farms. In fact, once upon a time, I had a girlfriend in California and I went out to Palm Springs and I saw the wind turbines out there and of course at that time they looked more like windmills. They were lattice towers, very small. It struck me at the time that that looked more like Disneyland than anything that would ever happen in Texas until about December of 1999, a rancher client of mine, a longtime friend of the family came in with a very thick sheet of papers and said he had a proposed wind lease on his property. And that was the very first wind lease that I did. And that sort of kicked off an avalanche of wind leases and projects in our area west, right out from here all over Texas. Even at the time when he came in, I was a skeptic that he was the kind of guy that was always looking for a new way to make some money, know, cut mesquite wood and sell it to aunts or any kind of innovative idea. He told me he had a wind lease from some landmen in South Dakota about erecting wind turbines on his land. I said, I think I would just pass on that one. He said, no, I want you to look over the lease and see if it doesn’t have some viability and be as hard on them as you can. Just don’t kill the deal. Cause I think they might actually be onto something. So that’s what I did.Joshua Rhodes: When you were looking over that wind lease, how different was it from the oil and gas leases and everything else that you had been looking over?Rod Wetsel: Well, it was similar in some respects. In one respect, it was all energy biased. There weren’t really any provisions in favor of the landowner. Was more like the old producers’ 88 oil and gas leases. But those are two pages long. This was like a 50-pager. Yeah. And he asked me to look it over and after a few days he came back said, what do you think? said, I’d throw it in the trash. Because it’s really completely in favor of the wind company and those people are going to tear your place up and you’ll never make any money. And that’s when he urged me to go ahead and try to make a deal with them, which after a number of months, we were able to do that. And the company was actually out of California. It was GE wind, which at the time was part of Enron, as you know, had its own stigma involved. We managed to get it done and the good news about him, the guy’s name was W.A. Oatman, we were able to get the lease negotiated. That was the very first lease I did. It’s on the Double Heart Ranch, is, it’s up on the Callahan Divide. It’s a ridge just south of Sweetwater where the elevation goes up about 500 feet. Wind really blows up there. And he was able to eventually get about 33 turbines built on his property, so.Joshua Rhodes: How many wind leases have you done since that first one, you reckon?Rod Wetsel: It would be hard to calculate. I would say probably somewhere in the 10,000 range maybe. Some of these projects would have as many as three or 400 landowners that we would all represent. And that made it really a challenge for lawyers and that how do you meet with 300 people at the same time? You have to find a ...

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Who Pays for the New Grid with Pablo Vegas

Apr 800:45:26Tap to summarize

ERCOT’s current rulemaking process will shape the Texas grid for decades, driving infrastructure investments that last 30 to 50 years and cost billions of dollars.During this year’s SXSW Texas Future’s Summit in Austin, ERCOT Chief Executive Pablo Vegas sat down with Energy Capital Podcast hosts Josh Rhodes and Matt Boms to explain the grid operator’s approach.ERCOT has added more than 60 gigawatts of new supply since the devastating Winter Storm Uri blackouts in 2021, and battery storage resources have grown from a few hundred megawatts to more than 16 gigawatts. Vegas said the grid is more reliable today than it was three years ago. The challenge now is to plan for what’s coming. Last month, ERCOT announced that load interconnection requests now exceed 410 gigawatts. For comparison, existing load has peaked at around 85 gigawatts in recent years. New data centers drive much of that growth.In this episode, Vegas described how ERCOT determines which projects in the interconnection pipeline are likely to be built. Even a fraction of those projects could reshape the system, especially if data centers arrive in the concentrations that some projections suggest.Vegas also walked through ERCOT’s proposed batch study process for reviewing large load interconnection requests, and why the current one-review-at-a-time approach is inadequate given growing load projectionsAnd he discussed residential demand response — and why it may be a faster path to reliability than building new generation or transmission.The ERCOT grid is growing like never before — yet demand is growing even faster. ERCOT’s response to this challenge will shape our grid and our economy for generations. Check out this week’s episode to learn more about what that response will look like.Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.Timestamps* 00:00 - Introduction and Pablo Vegas* 03:40 - Lessons from Winter Storm Uri* 05:42 - How 60 GW of New Supply Changed the Grid* 09:18 - Filtering the 230 GW Load Forecast* 13:28 - Why Data Center Load Broke the Old Process* 19:15 - How ERCOT’s Batch Study Process Works* 22:02 - DERs and the Distribution Grid* 26:57 - Real-Time Co-optimization and RTC+B* 30:11 - Battery Duration vs. Flexibility* 33:26 - Residential Demand Response* 36:41 - How ERCOT Is Using AI* 40:35 - What Texas Should Learn and ExportResourcesPeople & Organizations* Pablo Vegas (LinkedIn)* ERCOT (Website)* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)* Webber Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn)* IdeaSmiths (Website - LinkedIn)* Matt Boms (LinkedIn)* Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance (Website - LinkedIn)* Energy Capital (Website - LinkedIn - YouTube)Company & Industry News* ERCOT Goes Live with Real-Time Co-optimization Plus Batteries* RTC Deployed, ERCOT Takes on New Challenges in 2026* New Batch Study Framework for Large Load Interconnections* Texas Task Force Aims to Tear Down Barriers to Virtual Power Plant PilotPrograms & Processes Discussed* ERCOT Large Load Integration* ERCOT Large Load Working Group* Real-Time Co-optimization Plus Batteries Task Force* Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource Pilot ProjectRelated Podcasts by Energy Capital* Who Pays for Texas Grid Growth? Roundtable Discussion* Is Texas Ready for Winter Now? with Will McAdams* Flexibility Driving Reliability and Affordability with Matt BomsTranscriptJoshua Rhodes (01:37.714)the most in the first few years leading our cup? Pablo Vegas (01:40.878)I guess what’s been really interesting learning is, and when you work in the utilities space, and I worked in the utility space in Arcox, back in Albuquerque, Texas, but I’ve worked in the utility space, as you said, for quite a while, for over about 20 years. Pablo Vegas (01:56.908)I was surprised how different grid operations is from what it looks like inside of the utility. So the issues that the grid operator deals with in contrast to what a utility company deals with is pretty stark. And while there’s a lot of kind of overlap on elements of it, of course, but kind of the focus of what we’re looking at, which is, you know, looking at all of the issues across all the different components and players in the system, it’s a lot more complex trying to consider all of the Pablo Vegas (02:26.67)needs of the different stakeholders that are part of the process. When you’re a utility company, you’re always laser focused on your customers, you know, directly, and you’re serving them and you’re making sure that you are working constructively with, you know, your regulators and policymakers to serve your customers. At the grid operator level, the customers are still a very critical part of the conversation, but you’re doing that through one layer removed in helping to oversee the processes. Pablo Vegas (02:52.354)that govern the utilities and the power producers and the retail electric providers and the brokers and traders, the large industrials and the small consumer, everything in between. And so you’re really thinking about kind of the policy making that affects each one of those segments in a different way. And that’s what surprised me a little bit in terms of just how complex that can be, how in many cases, how political it can be. We have a very unique environment in Texas where, you know, we govern, legislate all the policy for what happens in the wholesale power markets. Pablo Vegas (03:21.624)which is different than what happens in other states. And that’s something that adds to the complexity inside of Texas, but it also gives us benefits, gives us the agility, the ability to make change. And we’re seeing that realized today at the pace of change that’s happening. Matt Boms (03:34.9)And I think you came in at such an interesting time Matt Boms (03:37.373)after Winter Storm, Yuri. We just had the five year anniversary of Yuri recently. Do you still feel like that’s hanging over our heads or do you feel like we’re now entering this new chapter? We’re going to talk about low growth and data centers and all that. But you came into the job during that kind tumultuous period. Do you feel like that’s behind us now or do you still feel kind of the shadow of Winter Storm, Yuri hanging over us? Pablo Vegas (03:58.754)Bye. Pablo Vegas (03:59.48)firmly believe that the memory of Yuri is going to remain with those who experienced it for years and years to come. I don’t think it’s something that is gonna be forgotten and put into the past and nor should it because it has taught us lessons across so many different facets of the work that we do, the importance of great communications. That’s something that was, I think, a very early lesson learned in the process that there needs to be so much better transparency Pablo Vegas (04:29.424)in terms of the role that our cop plays, what we do and how we do it, why we do it, who we work with in delivering the general service that everybody experiences. It was clear that it was not well understood as we went through the whole URI e...

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Texas Growth Is Running Into Power Grid Limits with Katie Coleman

Mar 2600:41:48Tap to summarize

Texas built its electricity market to react quickly to changes in demand, attract private capital, and protect ratepayers from private-sector investment risk.A wave of large load interconnection requests is testing that model.In this conversation, Katie Coleman, a leading Texas energy lawyer and partner at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, describes the pressure points facing the ERCOT grid. Officials are scrambling to determine which loads are real, how quickly they will arrive, and how the state should build transmission and other infrastructure to support them.Coleman brings ERCOT’s challenge into focus. She explains how customers behave differently — signing different contracts, facing different operating constraints, and placing different demands on the system — and grid managers have to juggle those variables.She also walks through a basic divide in the Texas market between generation and transmission. Private investors assume the risk of building generation. But with transmission, regulated utilities must get permission from the PUC to build power lines and then charge consumers for them (plus profit margin) over time.As interconnection requests climb and forecasts shift, these infrastructure decisions will become increasingly important — for the ERCOT grid and Texans’ power bills.The episode explores a range of issues, including:* How ERCOT and policymakers should judge new load forecasts.* Why transmission planning is a central constraint.* How Texas can preserve market discipline while serving growth.Coleman also points to the importance of regulatory stability. As large customers, generators, and utilities make long-term decisions about growth and investment, they need an energy market they can read.That predictability becomes even more crucial, Coleman says, as Texas debates how to respond to unprecedented demand growth.'Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.Timestamps* 00:00 - Introduction & Katie Coleman* 01:05 - Katie’s Energy Origin Story* 04:01 - Why She Represents Industrials* 05:55 - What Large Power Users Want* 08:56 - Speed to Power in Texas* 10:57 - How Industrial Demand Response Works* 17:04 - Crypto, Data Centers, and Misperceptions* 20:43 - How the Energy-Only Market Works* 28:27 - Load Forecasts and Transmission Risk* 36:46 - Bringing Generation With New Load* 38:49 - Why Texas Needs Stability* 40:32 - Final Reflections & CloseResourcesPeople & Organizations* Matt Boms (LinkedIn)* Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance (Website - LinkedIn)* Energy Capital Podcast (LinkedIn - YouTube)* Katie Coleman (LinkedIn)* O’Melveny & Myers LLP (Website - LinkedIn)Related Podcasts by Texas Energy & Power* Who Pays for Texas Grid Growth? - Roundtable Discussion* More Power That’s Faster and Fairer* Where the Grid Goes from Here | Reading and Podcast Picks - Feb. 4, 2026* Another Winter Storm Bears Down on Texas | Reading and Podcast Picks - Jan. 23, 2026Transcript Matt Boms (00:05.198)Today, I’m really excited to be joined by Katie Coleman, managing partner of the Austin office at Olmelvney and Myers. Katie is one of the leading energy regulatory attorneys in Texas. She has more than 15 years of experience representing large industrial energy customers in ERCOT and before the Public Utility Commission of Texas. She’s best known for her work representing groups like the Texas Industrial Energy Consumers, TIEC, and the Texas Association of Manufacturers, TAM.helping shape some of the most important conversations around energy markets and policy in the state. Katie has also been deeply involved in the industry more broadly. She served as president of the Gulf Coast Power Association, and she previously led the state bar of Texas public utility law section. And across the energy community in Texas, she’s widely respected as one of the very best regulatory lawyers in our business. So Katie, thank you so much for making time for us, and thanks for joining the podcast today.Katie Coleman (01:03.726)Absolutely glad to be here.Matt Boms (01:05.558)I wanted to start with a layup and I wanted to ask you to just walk us through how you first got into energy. Like what is your origin story and how did you end up in this business?Katie Coleman (01:15.182)Yes, so I have no qualifications. I have no business doing this job that I’ve now been doing. My bio actually, I need to update it. This is actually the 20th year when I first started in the industry, which I count as when I clerked when I was in law school, which then turned into a permanent job. I spent the summer doing this, finished law school, and then came back in 2006. So it’s been 20 years now.I went to UT undergrad. I was a liberal arts major. I did a small honors program at UT called Plan To, which people at UT are familiar with, but a lot of other people aren’t. But it is just an interdisciplinary liberal arts honors program. So I had no idea what I was going to do. And I did that very cliched thing where I took the LSAT to see how I did and then ended up in law school. Even in law school, I had no idea that I was going to end up in this field.So I’m not from Texas. I’m actually from outside of Asheville in North Carolina. And Austin felt like a huge city to me when I was in school here. And in law school, I looked at jobs in Houston. I looked at jobs in Dallas. I actually split my summer in Austin and Dallas. And Dallas just felt unmanageable for me being from a very small mountain town. And so I really focused on Austin. And obviously there’s a big regulatory workforce here.in Austin with the capital and all the state agencies. And so the firm that I clerked with, which was at the time Andrews Kerr, this was a big part of the work they did. So I tried several different sections and really liked the policy aspect of the energy practice. And the partner that originally hired me, I think took me around and met some of the clients, met some of the stakeholders that we were going to interact with regularly. And it seemed like a good fit. So he,hired me on a little bit of a whim. And here we are. I feel really lucky. It’s been a really good fit and I’ve really enjoyed it, especially all of the people that we work with, I think make this a really unique, special industry. And I think that’s what I picked up on when I was looking at options. And so I’ve kind of learned it as we’ve gone and I’ve had great mentors that are very credentialed and do know a lot of things about power markets andKatie Coleman (03:36.706)just industrials in general that have taught me everything I know along the way. So that’s really been key.Matt Boms (03:42.978)That’s awesome. And when you say 20 years, I’m sure it probably feels like where did those 20 years go? Cause the time goes by so quickly.Katie Coleman (03:49.806)You know, it felt like that for a while and then in 2021 it stopped feeling like that. From 2021 until now it feels like it’s been like another 20 years.Matt Boms (04:01.036)Yeah, well, I guess the last part of the origin story is like, did you come to represent the large industrial customers? Like, how did the door open for you and how did you take that path?Katie Coleman (04:10.296)So I inherited it, is the short story. The group of attorneys that I started my career with, who I still work with, have a legacy that goes all the way back to the original adoption of the Public Utility Regulatory Act, and back in the 70s. And at that time, there was a lawyer in Houston, he was at a different firm, Mayor Day Caldwell and Keaton at the time. Jonathan Day was involved in writing Pura.along with some other attorneys. And when the bill passed, they sort of divided up, you know, who was going to take which sector of the industry, who was going to work with the utilities. And Jonathan in Houston, with the Ship Channel and with strong industrial relationships, decided he was going to represent the industrial users. And so he then trained another attorney who then trained another attorney who then trained me. A...

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SPECIAL REPORT: Texas Feels the Iran Oil Shock with Michael Webber

Mar 1800:21:04Tap to summarize

For a century, the Strait of Hormuz has been one of the world’s key energy choke points. But during the past couple of decades, the U.S. relationship to the shipping lane has changed.In this special episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, Josh Rhodes talks with Michael Webber about what the Iran conflict means now, especially for Texas. The U.S. is not as vulnerable to oil shortage as it once was, but greater energy self-sufficiency does not insulate the country from global prices.The U.S. now produces more oil and gas than it did in the 1970s, when another energy crisis rooted in the Middle East rattled the U.S. economy. That leaves the nation less vulnerable from a security perspective.But consumers in Texas are still tied to global markets through pricing, refining constraints, and fuel trade flows. As Webber explains, even if the country has enough energy overall, price spikes abroad can still show up here at the pump, and they can linger.The conversation gets into a few issues that will develop over the coming weeks and months:* Why gasoline and diesel prices may rise with a delay, then fall more slowly than consumers expect.* Why U.S. oil abundance does not fully protect Americans from disruption overseas.* Why Texas benefits, and what’s at risk, from the state’s current energy mix.Rhodes and Webber also stress that resilience covers a range of issues: what resources can be refined, what generation and infrastructure can be built, and how quickly the system can adapt to challenges. That spotlights variables including refining capacity, permitting reform, and the roles of wind, solar, batteries, and electrification in reducing exposure to fuel volatility.The episode explores how Texas fits into a deeply interconnected global energy system, even after the state’s shale revolution.The unresolved question: if the disruption in the Middle East continues, where will the state’s real vulnerabilities start to show?Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.Timestamps* 00:00 - Iran Conflict & U.S. Exposure* 02:29 - Why Prices May Rise* 03:57 - Self-Sufficient, Still Coupled* 06:07 - Texas Refining Constraints* 08:03 - SPR, Export Bans, and Policy Tools* 10:48 - Renewables, Gas, and Energy Security* 16:35 - Affordability Politics* 19:14 - Permitting Reform & OutroResourcesPeople & Organizations* Texas Energy & Power (Website - LinkedIn - YouTube)* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)* IdeaSmiths (Website - LinkedIn)* Michael Webber (LinkedIn)* Webber Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn)* International Energy Agency (Website)* U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (Website)Company & Industry News* US gasoline prices soar past $3.75 a gallon as Middle East war rages on* Oil settles up 9% as Iran vows to keep Strait of Hormuz closed* Goldman Sachs raises Q4 Brent, WTI crude price forecast amid longer Hormuz disruption* Here’s the energy policy we need for the war in IranRelated Podcasts by Energy Capital Podcast* Build Fast or Fall Behind with Michael Webber* Interview with Energy Expert Dr. Michael WebberRelated Posts by Texas Energy & Power* The Growing Importance of Energy Efficiency* Why Are Energy Bills Rising So Fast?TranscriptJoshua Rhodes: Welcome to the Energy Capital podcast. This is a bit of a special edition where we’re going to talk to Dr. Webber again. We’re talking on Friday, March 13th, and we’re really kind of doing a little bit of a current events type take on the energy impacts of the current conflict in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Dr. Webber just published an article or an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle where he just talked about the energy implications of what that would mean for the U.S. So Dr. Michael Webber, welcome back to the Energy Capital Podcast.Michael Webber: Thanks so much. It was great to be here and have another conversation with you. I appreciate you inviting me. Absolutely.Joshua Rhodes: Well, let’s dive in. You wrote in your op-ed that the energy risks we worried about 20 years ago, like disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, that are actually happening right now, but you argue that the U.S. Might not care as much this time around. Why is that?Michael Webber: That’s right. I’ll say that first of all, the risks of the Strait of Hormuz have been known since the seventies, but really amplified as a risk in the eighties with the Iran-Iraq Tanker War that happened in the eighties and is really the main justification for why the US Navy projects so much force there just to keep the shipping lanes open, all that kind of thing. So the risk of the Strait of Hormuz as a choke point for global commerce around oil and refined products and helium and aluminum and other things like fertilizer area, that’s been known. But what has changed is how much we might care. So 20 years ago, when I studied this for Think Tank doing national security work for the Pentagon, we identified the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as one of the biggest single point risk failures the world could go through in terms of destabilizing global energy markets. But that was before the shale revolution, all these other things that happened 20 years ago. So we were really worried about what this might mean in terms of United States even getting access to the resources in the first place, plus price spikes and everything else. In the 20 years since we did that study for the Pentagon, The Shale Revolution’s come through, so we have a lot more domestic oil and gas production. We’re now exporting instead of importing. We have a lot more wind and solar, so we need less domestic fuels like coal or natural gas in the power sector. The whole situation’s changed where we’ll be exposed to the risks of higher prices, but we have enough supplies. We don’t have worry about absolute supply cutoff. And that’s a good position to be in. I think we should celebrate when we can policy successes. And I would say the last 20 years have been a combination of policy successes. That put us in a better national security position when it comes to disruption to Middle Eastern flows of energy.Joshua Rhodes: So Americans are already seeing higher gasoline prices and diesel prices after this escalation. You mentioned that these price spikes can often lag disruption by a week or two, but should consumers expect this to get worse?Michael Webber: I expect it to get worse and I also expect the high prices to linger for a while. So there are a couple of things that happen. The disruption happens physically. The prices start to reflect it in the futures market pretty quickly, but at the gasoline pump say a little bit later. So there’s some lag time between physical disruption and higher prices. And then there’s also lag time from when the disruptions are settled and when prices come back down. But sadly, as one of the sort of bitter ironies of life, prices go up a lot faster than they come down for variety of reasons. Yep. So even if the disruptions sorted out in the next few days, I expect higher prices to hang around for a while because people have to refill their inventories and they have to price in the risk of...

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SPECIAL REPORT: Texas Feels the Iran Oil Shock with Michael Webber