Siegel: The cost to build combined-cycle gas plants doubled or tripled
Paul Siegel · PJM and ERCOT navigate a capacity rollercoaster · Feb 12, 2026 · at 14:44
LS Power CEO Paul Siegel explains why large data centers should bear the costs of grid upgrades, citing soaring capital costs for new power generation.
0:00 / 0:31exact quote · 31.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Two, we've gone through this, again, very short period where prices for building a new large generation resource went from, let's say, for a combined cycle 10 years ago, we could build a new combined cycle for A little bit over a thousand dollars per KW. And today, the cost for building that same combined cycle has doubled to tripled, and it's happened again in a very short planning horizon.”
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 Paul Siegel
Siegel: New large-scale gas power plants will not arrive before 2030
“Large scale gas is a 20, 30 plus new resource.”
Siegel: ERCOT forward market pricing cannot support new gas generation
“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…”
Siegel: Battery saturation in ERCOT has compressed incremental investment returns
“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…”
Siegel: PJM capacity prices surged from $30 to over $300 per megawatt-day
“When we rewind back just a couple of years, we had capacity clears that were going off between 30 and 50 dollars per megawatt day, and that compares to a little bit over 300 dollars a megawatt day in the more recent clears and subject to the cap in the capacit…”
Siegel: Delivering large-scale gas generation takes four to five years
“And our planning horizons when it comes to large-scale gas-fire generation aren't measured in months. Today, I would say they're really measured over the course of four to five years between the realization that there's a need and all of the activities that ar…”
Siegel: PJM demand response participation stayed flat despite surging capacity prices
“So if you look at demand response and what's happened to demand response over the last several auctions we haven't had much more demand response participation in spite of the fact that the price signal has gone from virtually no payment for capacity to a very …”