It's Going to Happen First in Texas with Nat Bullard (Part 2)

This long-form conversation focuses on how falling battery and solar costs — plus rapid distributed deployment — are changing grid planning and commercial power decisions in Texas and globally. Bullard frames the transition as pragmatic and portfolio-driven: for large new loads (for example 500 MW data centers) the lowest-risk path is large solar arrays, substantial batteries (progressing to multi‑hour durations), and a combustion turbine (CT) or other firming option retained as the tail resource. He repeatedly emphasizes that market and regulatory incentives (e.g., energy-only prices, California’s historical four‑hour payment structure, and ERCOT interconnection tripwires at 10 MW) have driven specific engineering norms (like widespread 4‑hour batteries and many 9.9 MW DERs), but those artifacts are now changing as technology and business models evolve.

Bullard and Lewin unpack several concrete datapoints and implications: Texas’s Energy Fund ($7.2B) targets ~10 GW but may be concentrated in ~15–20 projects, most of them peakers; Texas system peaks were ~85.5 GW (2023) and fell slightly in 2024–25 while minimum loads rose materially (some months +20–25%), in part from data center demand (estimated ~22 TWh in Texas in 2023). On distributed storage and residential adoption, the podcast cites high attachment rates for solar+storage (e.g., ~90% in some Houston installers), Base Power’s $1B Series C fundraising, and international evidence (Australia reported ~800 MWh of residential batteries in two months under a support mechanism). Bullard argues these distributed assets create resilience and new market dynamics that could compete with centralized, subsidized gas buildouts — an outcome to watch as both capital markets and interconnection rules respond. Finally, he stresses demand-side flexibility (insulation/thermal storage, heat pumps, vehicle-to-home) and global solar manufacturing scale (Chinese module capacity) as forces that will keep variable solar growth large and require new operational models rather than simple one‑for‑one replacement of thermal capacity.