ERCOT made a choice years ago that most of the country is now reconsidering. Texas runs an energy-only market with no capacity payments, connects generation through connect-and-manage, sorts out delivery in dispatch, and pushes interconnection risk onto developers. That design is a big part of why Texas has added generation faster than any other U.S. grid. PJM, the operator for much of the eastern U.S., is now weighing whether to move in that direction. A white paper from the operator describes ...
Jun 24, 2026•38 min
Texas spent five years rebuilding its electrical grid based on the lessons of Winter Storm Uri. Now regulators face a harder question: who pays for the surge of large new customers trying to connect? The projections for electricity demand run far above what will actually get built, and hyperscalers want to power their data centers within 18 months, a pace much faster than the three-to-five years large industrial loads once took. ERCOT has run out of spare capacity, and the cost of building more ...
Jun 10, 2026•43 min
Right now, connecting a data center to the grid works like Texas hog season: no defined season, no bag limits, first-come-first-served, file as many interconnection requests as you want. Travis Kavulla’s recent essay in American Affairs argues the power industry needs something closer to deer season, with defined rounds, allocation rules, and prices that reflect what grid access actually costs. The mechanism he favors is an open season, borrowed from interstate gas pipeline regulation. Rather th...
Jun 03, 2026•44 min
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 market...
May 27, 2026•50 min
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 adaptin...
May 20, 2026•43 min
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 ...
May 13, 2026•41 min
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 distin...
May 06, 2026•42 min
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 constructi...
Apr 29, 2026•48 min
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 en...
Apr 22, 2026•38 min
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...
Apr 15, 2026•40 min
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 reso...
Apr 08, 2026•45 min
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 sh...
Mar 26, 2026•42 min
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 ...
Mar 18, 2026•21 min
For a long time, the basic story in U.S. energy was stability. Demand growth had flattened, efficiency was doing more work than most people realized, and expansion was steady. Not anymore. In this week’s conversation, Josh Rhodes talks with Michael Webber about what may be the most important shift now underway in energy: the dramatic growth in electricity demand, in Texas and beyond. Data centers are a big part of the story, but not all of it. Electrification, industrial growth, and population g...
Mar 11, 2026•46 min
Behind the scenes, every few minutes, the ERCOT system generates tens of thousands of price signals, outage updates, and operational reports that demonstrate and drive the cost and availability of electricity. Most of that data is public. But how can Texans access it? This week, Joshua Rhodes talks with Max Kanter, chief executive officer of GridStatus, about the gap between public data and practical visibility and application, and why that matters in Texas. In this episode, they discuss: * Why ...
Mar 04, 2026•36 min
Texas’s new era of electricity demand is forcing policymakers to walk an unprecedented tightrope. The state has to keep the lights on – and it has to make sure that Texans can afford to do so.. Massive load growth from data centers, population, and electrification is teeing up existential questions for the ERCOT grid. How do we build what we need without overbuilding? And how do we avoid burdening households with costs that businesses and large users should be paying? Those questions framed our ...
Feb 25, 2026•39 min
Texas keeps adding load, adding generation, and adding complexity. But attracting the next wave of investment often comes down to a crucial question: How does ERCOT use market forces – especially signals that determine where energy prices are set – to boost reliability on the grid? In this episode, Josh Rhodes sits down with Andrew Reimers to pull back the curtain on the machinery most people never see, including operating reserves, scarcity pricing, and what changed when ERCOT launched real-tim...
Feb 18, 2026•55 min
Every time a winter storm hits, Texans run through a mental checklist: gather more blankets, drip the pipes, and hope the grid holds up. Kurt Heim , Vice President of Environmental Advancement at Daikin Comfort Technologies North America Inc., understands why that anxiety stuck after 2021’s devastating Winter Storm Uri. But this reliability and affordability problem has a surprisingly accessible solution. In this episode, Kurt and host Matt Boms zero in on a big part of winter peak demand that d...
Feb 11, 2026•42 min
Texas just got another winter gut-check—not on the level of the deadly 2021 freeze, but still with enough ice, outages, and anxious headlines to remind everyone how fast confidence can evaporate. In this episode, Matt Boms and Josh Rhodes unpack what they saw in real time. The biggest takeaways are simple: a lot has improved, and some of the hardest problems are still sitting right in the open. “There were a lot of questions… what has changed since Winter Storm Uri [in 2021]. The first part of t...
Jan 31, 2026•33 min
In two weeks, Texas will observe the five-year anniversary of Winter Storm Uri — the devastating 2021 freeze that drove electricity demand to unprecedented heights, froze gas lines and plants, and triggered a blackout that darkened nearly half of the state. The anniversary will come just days after the latest arctic blast hits Texas; this coming weekend, people across the state will likely see lows well below freezing, as well as snow and freezing rain. It’s meaningful that state leaders express...
Jan 21, 2026•39 min
Texas is not short on energy. Texas is short on time. New load is arriving faster than the grid can plan, permit, and build, raising a question that will shape our state’s future: can Texas grow without sacrificing reliability or pushing costs onto the wrong people? That was the backdrop for our first Energy Capital roundtable with Matt Boms, Joshua Rhodes, and Micalah Spenrath. The Defining Story of 2025 When we talked about the biggest energy story of 2025, everything circled back to load. Not...
Jan 08, 2026•27 min
This episode is a little different. As I wrote on Friday: this is both a transition and an expansion . Several folks will be stepping up to use this platform and I couldn’t be more excited to hear what comes next. A platform, now with more places to stand Archimedes said: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth.” This podcast will become a platform for more people to stand. The podcast is moving into a multi-host format, and one of those new voices is Matt Boms, Executive Director of...
Dec 14, 2025•38 min
Everyone’s talking about the cost of power lately. But the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute has been studying, talking, writing, and working to do something about it, for over a decade. In recent research, TEPRI found that 65 percent of low and moderate income Texans are cutting back on essential energy use , often turning off AC in extreme heat. But their demand reductions aren’t necessarily saving them much money or supporting the grid. Affordability is now a very high salience issue an...
Dec 10, 2025•45 min
Thanksgiving Week Repost This episode originally aired in June 2024. We’re resurfacing it because the core idea discussed here were timely then and even more timely now. We’ve also refreshed the audio, with improved mixing and mastering for a clearer, smoother listen. Crusoe has scaled dramatically since this conversation, including major new funding and new projects in Texas. With so much energy news focused on problems, it felt right this week to highlight solutions in action. When most people...
Nov 26, 2025•56 min
“Everyone hates data centers.” That was the subject line on the email newsletter from Heatmap Daily the day before I sat down with Dr. Varun Sivaram , co-founder and CEO of Emerald AI . Communities see huge new loads coming onto the grid, hear about billions in new infrastructure, and worry that their bills will go up. It doesn’t have to work that way. Varun argues there are two paths. On the villain path , AI data centers drive up power bills and increase the likelihood of outages. On the hero ...
Nov 19, 2025•55 min
This is part 2 of my conversation with Nat Bullard. Check out Part 1 here: We talk a lot about the grid of the future. The truth is, that future is already showing up in Texas. Batteries are being built at record pace, data centers are chasing cheap and reliable power, and Texans are adding gigawatts worth of backup systems in homes, schools, and factories. I sat down with energy analyst Nat Bullard to ask a simple question: if we look at what is actually being built — not the rhetorical argumen...
Nov 12, 2025•39 min
This is Part 1 of my conversation with Nat. Part 2 will be out next Wednesday. The Video is Live on YouTube Texas has plenty of energy stories. The harder part is finding the signal through the noise of endless filings. That is why Nat Bullard’s new venture, Halcyon, matters. It turns piles of ERCOT and PUC dockets into something manageable. It’s AI that makes dense regulatory filings sortable and understandable. Meanwhile, Nat’s annual presentation has become must-read material for anyone tryin...
Nov 05, 2025•40 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.texasenergyandpower.com Most solar panels are imported from China which now has the ability to manufacture over a terawatt (1,000 gigawatts) of solar modules every year — roughly equal to the entire installed base of generation in the US inclusive from every energy source. America makes less than 1/20 of that amount and even less when it comes to the more difficult task of manufacturing cells. But Texas is known for manufacturing ...
Oct 29, 2025•21 min
The full video is on Youtube Texas isn’t just projecting future load growth; it’s happening now . Maura Yates of Mothership Innovations set the stage for our discussion at GCPA ’s Fall conference earlier this month in Austin. “We are looking at meters that are 800 megawatts on a single meter… that’s crazy. We used to think 10 megawatts was a big deal…” She also cut through the headline noise: “The next three years are really critical… This is the them we are hearing at this conference: it’s a ne...
Oct 22, 2025•41 min
Watch the Conversation on YouTube Headlines warn that data centers are straining the Texas grid. The reality is more interesting: data centers — through their own flexibility and by supporting distributed flexibility markets — can strengthen the grid. I explored that topic and a lot more with Astrid Atkinson , CEO and co-founder of Camus Energy and former senior reliability engineer at Google. At Google, she led teams responsible for keeping the world’s search engine online, matching computing l...
Oct 15, 2025•1 hr 3 min
