Texas

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

“And even in some of the Texas outages, in general, the renewable, renewable energy assets tended to perform better than the gas or thermal assets.”

“There's a project in Texas, for instance, that's, you know, that's using supercritical CO₂ as the working fluid.”

“And we had that in Texas where we first had a power outage, ten million people without power, but then we had fourteen million people under a boil water notification, Because the water wasn't safe to drink because the water and wastewater treatment plants didn…”

“We don't have to wait for the far future for desalination. It's already happening today in Israel and In parts of California, and inland Texas, and Israel, and Australia. So places that are water scarce already do some desalination. Even if the electricity is …”

“And of course, California and Texas are getting the lion's share of these, of what's going to be installed over the next two years.”

“I think projections have them increasing something like three times over the next 18 months primarily driven by markets like California and Texas.”

“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.”

“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…”

“We're having massive agricultural losses in Texas right now from the heat wave and drought. They can't get the feed for the cattle, so they take cattle to market before they're at full weight, so they get less money.”

“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…”

“Texas has around 40 gigawatts of installed wind. It's three times more than any other state, so Iowa is the next at about 12 and a half gigs. This is just under 30% of all U.S. Wind power capacity.”

“Texas, during Yuri almost lost power for probably multiple weeks and they were, I think, 30 minutes away from that happening.”

“We've not yet woken up to how much we need to be modeling these more extreme weather events into electricity reserve allocation modeling, basically. There, there's a bunch of data around, so like Texas, another example of this, right? You know, where you see t…”

“Be interesting to speculate a little bit on this one, like one region that has not seen nearly as much investment historically, but I would place a bet is going to show up on your rankings at least higher the next couple of years is Texas.”

“So if you take Australia, for example, where one in three homes have rooftop solar, I think that's about 20 gigawatts of solar, so a very similar solar install capacity to somewhere like Texas”

“And it's also easier to get a grid connection in Texas than it is in many other parts of the world. I think it takes about one to two years. In the UK, it can take up to 15 years to get a grid connection.”

“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.”

“Texas, for instance, has no rules right now governing lithium extraction, which I think people just assume because Texas has a huge history in oil and gas extraction that it would also have these lithium rules, but they haven't developed them yet.”

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

“Grid connected batteries have like in, if you look at the cluster of the dot plot of all of this, you know, in the mid to high nineties availability as a resource, whether the temperature is below 32 degrees Fahrenheit or above a 105, there is a little bit of …”

“Just last week, our own partner Solvay started their Plant in France again to separate rare earth elements, and Linus, an Australian company, is building capacity in Texas, I believe.”

“Vacuum Schmitz is building a large magnet manufacturing facility in South Carolina. MP Materials in Texas and a few other companies are building capacity.”

“In Texas one gigawatt of peak load is attributable to pool pumps. These are pool pumps that don't have to run during peak periods.”

“A huge part of getting to the one gigawatt goal will also be, you know, starting to give access to low costs and no cost thermostats, smart thermostats across, you know, NRG's existing user base and growing user base. Also deploying other targeted technologies…”

“If you look at it in a place like Texas, for instance, where the average price for electricity on any given day is actually pretty low. Like the real time price may be sitting around 20 dollars a megawatt hour. So you go off grid in Texas and you're paying som…”

“The only argument, you know, you ever had for building something like a baseload generator in Texas is that sometimes the price would go to 5000 or 9000 dollars a megawatt hour, but with the massive amounts of solar and storage coming out of the grid, which yo…”

“In Texas we were able to pass energy waste reduction legislation earlier this year, and that requires state agencies to really work together to get the most out of demand flexibility and demand response programs.”

“We are deploying megawatts in Texas very quickly like on the order of 20 megawatts a month.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Senate bill six in Texas is kind of like an example of that, where if you're kind of 70 megawatts and over, you need to have the ability to curtail and other states are adopting like similar measures as well.”

“The ones that are the most flexible by far are the crypto data centers, and there's lots of them in Texas, and they're the ones that have, like, flexibility in terms of, well, if the prices are super high, ah, I don't need to curtail.”

“I don't think you'll see generalized solutions where there's just like autonomous trucks zigzagging like everywhere for a while, but I think what you'll see is some specific segments, mostly in Texas, where you'll see occasional autonomous trucks and some sc…”

“Tesla, you know, does have kind of an in-app process to participate in these programs. They're started in Texas. They're working with Pacific Gas and Electric in California to participate in their VDAX pilot program, and so I believe it is kind of a streamline…”