Solar and batteries have killed Texas's $9,000 per megawatt-hour price spikes
Brian Janous · When to colocate data centers with generation · Sep 12, 2025 · at 15:33
Brian Janous explains why baseload generators in Texas no longer capture extreme price spikes due to increasing grid solar and battery capacity.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 you've probably talked about in another show, we're not seeing those spikes anymore. We're not seeing the scarcity of pricing”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Brian Janous
Behind-the-meter nuclear data centers have no credible case for decades
“I don't think there's a credible argument for behind the meter nuclear at a data center in the near future. And by near future, I mean, The next couple of decades.”
Janous: Traditional colocation data centers lack the energy talent for AI.
“And those companies that, that filled the gap in the last era are really not particularly well equipped, equipped to fill it in this era because the depth of energy talent at those companies is actually quite thin.”
Janous: Compute demand will exceed available power supply through 2030.
“It's possible, though I suspect that given the, my fundamental belief is that the demand for compute, let's just say through twenty-thirty, will exceed the available power in the market. And therefore, the marginal value of the next watt or gigawatt, frankly, …”
Janus: AEP will not connect 90 gigawatts in next decade
“There's no reason to believe that AEP is going to connect 90 gigawatts in the next 10 years.”
Janus: AI Training Loads Will Not Run as Intermittent Renewable-Following Workloads
“So I think it's a little bit overblown to say, and I think this is also true of Something like the conversation around crypto, but that these are highly curtailable loads that you could just, you know, attach a training model to a wind farm and only run it, yo…”