Doug Lewin Videos

Rayburn Electric Cooperative broke ground in June on a 570 MW gas plant in Sherman, backed by a $411 million Texas Energy Fund loan at 3 percent, the fund’s seventh generation loan and first to a cooperative. Rayburn is also putting batteries in […]

Last month the Public Utility Commission of Texas held public hearings on plans to build giant 765 kilovolt transmission lines. The controversial plan drew complaints from influential voices, including Senate Business and Commerce Chairman Charles Schwertner, […]

Wind, solar, and storage are the only new categories of generation to reach the US power system at scale in fifty years. Craig Gordon thinks his company is adding one. Mainspring Energy’s linear generator drives magnets through copper coils rather than […]

About 6 million electric vehicles are on American roads, and roughly 1 million of them can already export power back to the grid. A typical one sits parked about 95 percent of the day, plugged in for 12 to 14 hours while needing 2 to 3 hours of charge. Texas […]

Cattle prices swing, goat prices swing, and the drought comes whether or not the ranch can afford it. For a fifth-generation West Texas operation, the search for income that holds steady through all of it comes from an unexpected source: the wind. A wind […]

Some of the largest electricity buyers in the world have a message for Texas: charge us. The Texas Energy Buyers Alliance was the first organization to propose that large loads pay transmission charges tied to their approved capacity. The idea is to protect […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]