Doug Lewin Videos

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]