Energy Capital Podcast

Texas built a competitive retail electricity market: consumers choose among roughly a hundred providers, and generators build power plants at their own risk with no guaranteed return. Transmission, the high-voltage lines that move power from where it is made to where it is used, runs on a different model. One utility builds each line and recovers every cost from ratepayers, plus a return, on time...

Batch zero stops being theoretical on July 11. That is the day ERCOT’s rule for connecting large new customers takes effect. The new policy replaces a process that involved studying each giant load independently, then ordering restudies when new giant loads joined the queue, leaving projects stuck in a serial loop. Two prior episodes of this show traced how the new rule was designed. This one asks...

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...

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 l...

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. Th...

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 Comm...

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 a...

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 mark...

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...

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 NR...

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 growi...

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...

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 gigawa...

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...

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,...

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...

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 practi...

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...

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 neve...

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 s...

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. “T...

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 low...

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...

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...

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 necessari...