ERCOT

“We hit a new net load record in ERCOT because it was a hot day, and we had 10 gigawatts of batteries dispatch, and so prices never got above 250 bucks a megawatt hour”

“If you want to build a utility scale battery in PJM today, and you submit your interconnection application to get in the queue, on average, you're waiting about six years right now. In Kaiso, you're waiting maybe nine years. In ERCOT, you're waiting maybe four…”

“And I think the last really good year of battery pricing, for example, in Texas was probably around, like, twenty-twenty-three. And then it started to really drop in 24. And then, like, we saw it further in twenty-twenty-five.”

“And so we see cyclically in another couple of years, the prices will start to come back in ERCOT and people will start to make money again.”

“Power prices for the subsequent week went well over a thousand dollars per megawatt hour for the subsequent week.”

“10 gigawatts of load that was expected to show up didn't show up. There is no formal demand response program, but it's a price signal, and so this is like maybe the most stark example that I've seen of load responding to price at that kind of scale.”

“There was a big push through legislation to support new gas fire generation and ERCOT. I think if you look at forward markets, that's not supported by market pricing today. It may be supported by bilateral contracting opportunities, but when you look purely at…”

“A couple of years ago, we transitioned Intercut from a market that relies heavily on ancillary services to support batteries, and that was very robust. We built into that. That market was overwhelmed with supply, and then when you move out of the sort of small…”

“Volatility itself, I think will encourage them to look at contracting to enter into longer term arrangements to mitigate their risk and to support ongoing construction development of the kind of resources that we're going to need to keep this market in equilib…”

“The pipeline of large load interconnection requests in ERCOT in Texas was, what, 40, forty-ish, 42 gigawatts as of January of twenty-twenty-four. So two years ago, it went from forty-ish, 42 gigawatts to 226 gigawatts as of November of 25”

“I don't think that Texas is actually going to be building 226 gigawatts of just large load in the coming, let's say, seven to eight years.”

“ERCOT says, you know what, we could go from, like, a little under 500 Terawatt hours in 2024 to like a thousand by 20 30, right? So let's call it, you know, up a 110% in that time period. The transmission service providers on the other hand are like, sorry …”

“The true number is, Either somewhere in between or much closer to ERCOT's figure. I mean, ERCOT has the reason for demand, supply balancing, and upkeep, and everything else to get it really, really accurate in energy terms. But the transmission service prov…”

“You've got seven 65 KV AC plans. We mentioned SPP, but MISO in the more of the, like, the Great Lakes part of the Midwest and is looking at seven 65 PJM as well, and they just came out with a new very much more ambitious plan than we've seen from them. In the …”

“If you look in West Texas and you were to sign a solar and wind kind of affirmed green power purchase agreement in, in Texas and Urquhart territory three years ago, you might've paid 35 dollars a megawatt hour for that product. Today you're paying 65, maybe mo…”

“We've got on the order of 5000 of these batteries in the ground actually 5000 homes, and so it's more batteries, because a lot of them have two. We have had, in our direct business, we have had one customer”

“When volatility is high, people want to build a lot of batteries, and a lot of batteries presumably dampen volatility, and when volatility is low, people don't want to build a lot of batteries... Load growth is likely to still march up. Solar additions are lik…”

“And, you know, very soon here we'll have the largest aggregation by a wide margin. and you know, we'll, we'll continue to grow quickly and we'll be the largest aggregation of shared batteries in the country.”

“So this has happened in Texas, ERCOT, and it's happening in PJM which is the main, you know, the sort of northeast kind of area-ish. These two grids are putting these, like, rules where, hey, we're gonna actually say, hey, big loads, we can tell you, 24 hours …”

“The market trading piece has softened a little bit, just because those markets have been reasonably saturated, both in ERCOT and, in CAISO.”

“ERCOT has this controllable load service, which does make that sort of trade-off explicit. PG&E is doing it with their new FlexConnect program, primarily at distribution scale for EV chargers, but the hope is to expand it. Southern California Edison has a simi…”

“And, right, that's exactly what ERCOT does, right, for generation. They don't require upfront deliverability, and it allows them to get generation online much more quickly and at much higher rates.”

“And so that, I think, as a pricing plan has largely died in Texas.”

“A battery in Texas last year, and by battery I mean a grid scale sort of front of the meter asset, made over four times more than a battery in the GB market or the UK market, which is a huge difference.”

“The most flexible data center assets that we have seen, for better or for worse. A bunch of them are participating in demand response in ERCOT today.”

“Those like, crypto mines have been the most flexible data center assets that we have seen, for better or for worse. A bunch of them are participating in demand response and ERCOT today.”

“Right now, there aren't enough hours that have a long enough spread where it makes sense to have a hundred hour bar doing that. It does make sense for a four hour or two hour battery or even a one hour battery, frankly in ERCOT.”

“What I think is fair to say is that we don't really have good empirical evidence, ah, to prove or disprove this hypothesis yet. There have been, ah, transmission providers that have shifted to cluster studies in recent years. I was very involved in one of thos…”

“ERCOT is now at about 17 gigawatts of utility scale solar installed. The state at large at around 20 gigawatts of all solar. So it's now number two in the U.S. Just behind California. And the utility scale side now appears effectively equivalent with Californi…”

“The overall peak load in PJM is approximately two times that in ERCOT, and yet PJM's interconnection rate overall for all resources over the past two years has been approximately 2.5 times less than ERCOT.”

“The defining feature of ERCOT's interconnection process is that they don't rely on the interconnection process itself to identify and pay for grid upgrades. And this enables them to interconnect projects much more quickly and at much lower cost.”

“It's worth noting that there are some really significant limitations to ERCOT's transmission planning process, and there are a lot of concerns that it doesn't Incorporate the longer-term benefits of these upgrades, and the result is that they aren't, they prob…”

“What we're seeing is that a very, very large number of generators Believe that they are able to manage this risk, and that's contributing to this high interconnection rate.”

“So we're unlikely to see other markets go in an energy-only direction, and the question is whether we can incorporate some of The learnings and the process improvements that ERCOT has achieved into this alternative framework where you have both energy and capa…”

“We're getting, on some of the records, we're seeing there are days where, you know, renewables are serving 30% of the Texas, of Texas load, of ERCOT load, and I mean, 30% of ERCOT's load, it's 82 gigawatts.”

“They have issued some voluntary conservation notices, but it has not been quite as White knuckle driving as it has been in the last couple years, and a big part of that is, is the amount of renewable generation, and particularly solar, that they're having.”

“You know, we've got 80 gigawatts of battery storage in the queue to interconnect into the ERCOT grid at, right now.”

“So collectively, it's 1.8 billion conservatively per year. And that's sort of a run rate, I would say. And that represents around a five percent increase in costs of Texans, of, you know non-Bitcoin mining consumers. And that, that's across all the different s…”

“If you were to participate in the responsive reserve service, RRS, last year you would have earned a 180 dollars per kilowatt year, which is a really high number.”

“And then ERCOT is incredibly isolated. So there's one or two ERCOT has some minimal Back to back and some minimal AC at sort of very low voltage, but incredibly isolated. I think less than one percent of their load or something is available via transmission. C…”

“And even the parts of Texas that were not run by ERCOT, especially, right, were experiencing this extreme weather, but did not have this massive multi-day blackout problem. Because they had so much more power available and were able to share it.”

“They take merchant risk now. You see all of the battery storage deals that are getting debt funded in Texas on ERCOT merchant curves.”