Doug Lewin Videos

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 […]

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 […]