For this episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Zach Dell, who recently launched Base Power Company , the first and only retail electric provider in Texas to offer customers a home battery, monthly energy service, and installation all in one package. This episode demonstrates one of the things I most love about Texas’ competitive energy market. It has its flaws for sure, but we are seeing a lot of innovative offerings. And in that category, Base Power stands out. The goal of Base Power is t...
May 15, 2024•52 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.texasenergyandpower.com In 2020, at the Annual Meeting of the Greater Houston Partnership – the city’s powerful Chamber of Commerce and economic development organization with a heavy concentration of oil and gas companies – Bobby Tudor, the incoming Chairman of the Board, told the membership : “The oil and gas business is not likely to be the same engine for Houston’s growth over the next 25 years, that it’s been in the past 25 ye...
May 01, 2024•21 min
My guest for this week is Megan Kimble. Megan is an extremely talented writer and her new book entitled City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways is a must read for anyone interested in climate change, transportation, or just how cities came to be the way the are: How did we end up with massive, noisy, smelly, dirty highways right in the middle of every major city? Kimble unpacks an extremely complicated history in a page-turner of a book. She tells the storie...
Apr 26, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Before you listen: I will be hosting a mailbag episode in the next couple of weeks and am asking listeners to submit questions. Please send an email to douglewin@substack.com or leave your questions in the comments for this episode. Following Winter Storm Uri, the Texas legislature worked to identify proposals that can increase the reliability of the ERCOT grid. In this week’s episode, State Senator Nathan Johnson, representing Senate District 16 in Dallas and a member of the Business and Commer...
Apr 11, 2024•1 hr 15 min
During Winter Storm Uri, electric demand spiked to a record level. We don’t know exactly how high demand went, but ERCOT now estimates that next winter, in Uri-like conditions, demand would hit a whopping 92 gigawatts. One of the best ways to reduce risk of outages, and one of the only ways to save money while increasing reliability is to replace inefficient heating units with high efficiency heat pumps. That is just one of the reasons why I wanted to feature an entire episode on this amazing te...
Apr 04, 2024•1 hr 2 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.texasenergyandpower.com For this week's episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Andy Bowman. Andy has been developing renewable energy projects around the US for 25 years, which puts him back to the 1990s and some of the earliest wind projects in Texas. And while he's developed all over the US, he says ERCOT and Texas are his favorite place to develop. And we got into why. Andy was the founder of Pioneer Green Energy and Renew...
Mar 29, 2024•18 min
Electrons and molecules don't usually mix. Power grid people and gas supply people don't talk to each other much, nor do they much understand each other's worlds, languages, or businesses. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) cited this lack of gas and electric coordination as one of the causes of the Winter Storm Uri outages. However, it's not just a problem for reliability and energy security. People who work in the power and gas industries need to communicate because their worlds a...
Mar 20, 2024•1 hr
In this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, I had the opportunity to speak with Pablo Vegas, the President and CEO of ERCOT. There was a time when very few Texans knew what ERCOT was or what it did. Those days are long gone. Texans pay close attention to the grid following Winter Storm Uri and the ensuing outages. And the 13 conservation calls over the last nine months or so have kept ERCOT very top of mind. Vegas joined ERCOT in October 2022. Previously, he worked with NiSource, an electric ...
Mar 12, 2024•1 hr 13 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.texasenergyandpower.com At a winter preparedness workshop at the PUC held in October of last year, Commissioners asked several presenters if they could bring more resources online by Christmas. Of course, you can't build a big power plant that fast, but small distributed energy resources (DERs) — batteries, demand response, solar, etc. — can be added quite quickly. Still, most presenters said there simply wasn't enough time. John ...
Mar 07, 2024•20 min
One of the areas where we see the biggest injustices and the clearest manifestations of modern day racism is with pollution. Ports, refineries, fossil-fuel power plants, chemical manufacturing, landfills and more are, to this day, disproportionately cited in communities comprised mostly of Black, Latino, and/or Indigenous people. One of the very first researchers in the world on this topic is right here in Texas, Dr. Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University and the eponymous Bullard Center fo...
Feb 21, 2024•1 hr 6 min
When Texas lawmakers restructured the electric markets in the late 1990s, they left one part of the business fully regulated: the poles and wires companies. In Texas, CenterPoint is the second largest of these entities and serves Houston and most of the surrounding area. They serve about one-fourth of the total peak demand even though they cover only 3% of Texas’ landmass. It’s been a theme on this podcast and will continue to be: who’s going to be the orchestrator of all the small sources of po...
Feb 15, 2024•1 hr 14 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.texasenergyandpower.com There are massive changes happening to electric grids around the world, including here in Texas. Millions of devices, appliances, and increasingly vehicles are grid connected and could, with the proper systems in place to receive price signals, make grids more reliable, bring down energy costs for consumers, and make electric markets more competitive. But it's early days and there's a long way to go. We nee...
Feb 07, 2024•18 min
Dr. Michael Webber is one of the best known energy experts in Texas. He’s the John J. McKetta Centennial Energy Chair at the University of Texas at Austin, an author of multiple books on energy, and the Chief Technology Officer of Energy Impact Partners, a cleantech venture fund. Michael has a way of explaining and breaking down even the most complex energy concepts and topics into terms that are understandable and engaging to novices and experts alike. We started the conversation with Michael’s...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 16 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.texasenergyandpower.com For the second episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, I spoke with Beth Garza the former Independent Market Monitor (IMM) for ERCOT and current Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute. Throughout the episode, Beth did a great job breaking down complex concepts to make them more easy to understand. We talked about the challenges of the changing supply and demand mix, and how the societal trauma Texans experi...
Jan 25, 2024•13 min
For the inaugural episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, I spoke to Will McAdams, the former Commissioner of the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) who left the Commission just a few weeks ago. We spoke about his appointment to the PUC in the immediate aftermath of Winter Storm Uri and the challenges he faced during that tumultuous period. He told me what he was proudest of from his time on the Commission, including his efforts to wintererize power plants and “hold the line” to ensure a st...
Jan 17, 2024•1 hr 28 min
For the inaugural episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, I spoke to Will McAdams, the former Commissioner of the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) who left the Commission just a few weeks ago. We spoke about his appointment to the PUC in the immediate aftermath of Winter Storm Uri and the challenges he faced during that tumultuous period. He told me what he was proudest of from his time on the Commission, including his efforts to wintererize power plants and “hold the line” to ensure a st...
Jan 16, 2024•1 hr 28 min
