Energy Capital Podcast

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, e...

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 rig...

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 thi...

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,...

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...

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 a...

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...

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...