title: Innovation and Investment in ERCOT: Recorded Live from GCPA
author: Energy Capital Podcast
publication: Energy Capital Podcast
published: 2025-10-22T09:15:00
source_url: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/176776599/5b3f04f84f35b83e38050869a609d00d.mp3
word_count: 8502
It's great to be here this morning. Hope everybody's doing great. It's been a great couple of days. Really want to thank Gulf Coast Power for again putting together such a great event. I think I think my first Gulf Coast Power is like 15, 16 years ago. This is the 40th anniversary. It's amazing to see you guys still going so strong. This has been a great conference. I've learned a ton caught up with a lot of people. I am Doug Lewin. I do a couple different things but one of the things I do is I host the Energy Capital podcast. We are recording this today and we'll release it as an episode. So for those that are listening later, we are in Austin at the ATT Conference Center at the Gulf Coast Power Conference. So I have four amazing panelists here. I can't wait to get into this discussion. We've got a lot to talk about. But with each of you just briefly introduce yourselves and your companies. So folks kind of know who you are. You want to start at the end with Zach? Hey everybody, I'm Zach Dell. I'm co-founder and CEO of Base Power. Base is a retail energy provider and battery developer based here in Austin. Started the company about three years ago. Our mission is to lower the cost for electricity for all and we do that by developing technology solutions hardware software and the like to help rebuild the infrastructure here on the power grid in Texas and beyond. And I'll just say I did record a podcast with Zach. It was like a year ago, more than a year ago now. Two years ago. Was it really that long ago? Wow. So for those that want to know more about Base, you can go back whether you're in the room or listening later, you can go back and listen to that one. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Tom McGinn. I'm Senior Vice President of Energy Trading at Energy Well. Energy well operates a few different load-serving entities and competitive markets in the US, along with offering software and consulting services to other market participants. I've been working in competitive markets for almost 20 years now across all the competitive ISOs in the US. I kind of at the intersection of the wholesale and retail functions in those companies. So yeah, happy to be here with everyone. Thanks Tom Hayden. How's it going? My name is Hayden Stanley. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Good Peak. We're involved with building out distributed generation assets in Irkaat. We're vertically integrated. And we've recently also entered the digital realm with data centers. So excited to be here today. I'm Mara Yates. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Mothership Energy and Mothership Innovations. We are a retail electricity provider and Irkaat Market Service provider to large loads and load-serving entities across Irkaat. So everything from billing and operating services to queasy services, but again, really focusing on large complex loads across Irkaat. Such a great panel. So much knowledge and experience. And lots of like different experiences and different businesses represented here. So let's just start at a very high level with a question I like to ask on the podcast. I don't remember if I asked you this one two years ago. I probably did, but to be interesting to compare and contrast your answers, if I did, is one of my favorite questions, which is just a kind of look ahead four or five years. Sometimes I think the 10 and 20 years is like too far. Who knows? It's at anybody's gas. But four or five years far enough away that we're not talking about tomorrow or next week or even next year. You're looking like a 2030 kind of view. What do you think is really going to change in this Texas market? What are the technologies you're kind of most excited about? And I think even let's talk a little bit about what are some of the roadblocks and obstacles to getting to that vision. You want to start? Sure. So for those who know me in the room, they know that I've participated in the market for a while and done everything from Rezzy and the kilowatts all the way up to now megawatts and gigawatts. So we've seen this really crazy, interesting evolution, especially like the integration of renewables in Turricot. And I was reflecting with somebody last night about where we saw the market in 2013. 2025 was so far out. And did we see where we were, you know, 12 years ago? And I think in general, we kind of had a sense, yeah, this is where we were going to see a lot of renewables come online. We had a good idea of where generation was going. But I don't think we had a good idea of where load was going. Obviously, the latest incentives to move business to the state have really helped drive that. And not only do we not see where load was going, we didn't see the scale at which load was going there. Like we are looking at meters that are 800 megawatts on a single meter. That's crazy. That's insane. We used to think 10 megawatts was a big deal. Now 10 megawatts is like, I don't know if we have time for 10 megs that feels really small. So I mean, we've seen this really, really rapid shift and this change in trajectory in terms of where we're seeing this market go. And so when we talk about the next five years, it's really interesting. It's going to be, I think, much faster the rate of change than what we've seen perhaps the last five years. We saw the last five years coming. I don't know if we saw the next five years coming. So when I think about like what's going to happen, I think the next three years are super critical. The next three years will dictate what happens in five years. So when I really think about like what I'm focusing on or where mothership is focusing, we are focusing on the next two to three years and say what is going to happen in the next two to three years? Because that will absolutely determine what we see in 28, 29, 30. And again, I think this is the theme that we're hearing at this conference, largely a conversation about what's going to happen with large loads, what's happening as a result of SB6. This is the conversation. It's a very near term discussion. It doesn't mean that all the other discussions don't need to keep happening. We need to keep having the conversations around how do we manage our really elastic peaks with residential volatility. We still need to have those conversations, but we have this really big, urgent conversation in front of us of like what do the next two to three years look like? Because that will then dictate the tail after that. I mean, 190 gigs in the queue. We know that's not real. That's not what our future looks like in the next five years. What part of that is real? Maybe 5, 10%, maybe 10%, maybe 15%, maybe 20%. What do we actually think generation can keep up with? What is practical? What is feasible? And so I don't know what's going to happen in the next five years. Every month we get closer to that five-year benchmark. It'll be a little bit more willing to wager. But right now, I see the conversation of okay, we have a jam. We can't get to the numbers that we're talking about by 2030. We're two jammed up. So if I think like maybe another 10, 15 gigs by 2030, maybe in the next two to three years, three, four or five gigs, I don't know, depends on again how we handle and how we manage through the stuff that's jamming up right now. I think this gets to the innovation conversation that we can talk through more later, but yeah, two to three years. Yeah, before we go to, hey, just kind of a thread to pull on there a little bit is, you know, there's 190 gigs in the queue. I think part of the problem we're having is everybody is talking about the gigawatts and not necessarily the gigawatt hours or terawatt hours, right? And we started to see that shift at the Archive Board meeting last week, Pablo Vega CEO and yesterday here, Archive Bill Flores talked about the very same thing, showed the same slide that we are seeing increased use and consumption while demand has actually not increased the last couple years. Part of that's weather, but I think part of that is changing use patterns, which is something I think we'll talk about a lot here is like freeing up some headroom for some of those AI data centers. Hey, what are you looking at for 2030? Sure. Well, I mean, I think over the next five years, we're certainly in a race to when the AI race. So, you know, that's ultimately going to be enabled by power, you know, powers maybe one of the largest waves created by AI. I mean, interestingly enough, it does enable it. So, I think that that's it's paramount that we achieved some of these goals, but, you know, when I think five years, so now I think that there's going to be a lot of innovation is going to play a really big role. I think that there's going to be a lot more the grids become smarter, there's going to be more communication, more alignment, you're mentioning standard like demand not increasing, but a lot more consumption that just seems like efficiency to me. And, you know, I think things like that are amazing. I think that we're in a situation where I look at infrastructure maps a lot, and I think there's going to be a whole new layer had it on. I don't know if you guys play with those, but, you know, you turn on one layer another another. I think there's a whole new layer of infrastructure that's about to be added to the map. So, it's really exciting how all of that gets to be thought about and created and developed. So, happy to be a part of it and try to help. It's a fun time to be part of it. I love the way you said that. That just sounds like efficiency to me because I think part of what is happening with discussion about energy efficiency is that actually like using more electricity can be energy efficient, right? Particularly if you're using it for industrial purposes or transportation electrification. Like, it's a good thing to use more as long as you're using it at the right times and as long as we can move it around. Tom. Yeah, I mean, I think we're talking about just kind of lifting the system load factor as a whole, which, you know, hopefully has benefits downstream for recovery of system-wide costs. And, you know, I think maybe to take a slightly more pessimistic view of what the next five years might look like, you know, we heard previously of the backlog around getting new thermal generation online system loads going up. We're likely to see kind of increased just base load heat rates at least just through the higher system load factor. Resiliency seems like it's going to be a continued household concern. And, you know, part of me is concerned about what happens to the mass market in this kind of wave of new load or are they going to get, you know, run over for lack of a better term or, you know, are they not going to have adequate representation at some of these policy settings where, you know, they don't have the sophistication to manage load like some of our other large load customers that we talked about today. So, yeah, I guess I'm, you know, short term a little concerned about what that looks like. I think long-term with the continued innovation in the investment in the grid and other technologies kind of coming down the pike here that we would expect to see, you know, kind of a return to the abundance that Texas consumers have enjoyed thus far. Yeah, and I appreciate that little dose of, I wouldn't even call it pessimism, just like realism, right? Like there are concerns for residential consumers. The risk manager in the, I guess. No, and it's actually, I think it's very smart. I wrote down something Chairman Gleason spoke here at this conference on Monday and he said, we need to make sure consumers are empowered, not just protected, right? So, the consumer protection is in the DNA of every PUC, but how do you actually think about consumer empowerment? It's consumers want to save on their bills. They want to be more resilient, as you said, which is probably a great tee up for Zach. Your customer's want to be more resilient? No, just get it started with the 2030 question. Yeah, I'll be honest, I and the team at base, we think a lot more about 2040 than we do about 2030. And there's plenty of good reason to think about 26 and 27 and 28 and the near term, but our mission as a company is to drive price down and reliability up. And we're not talking 5% improvements. We're talking 50% improvements, right? I'm, you know, using round numbers here, but we want to make a really big impact on those two metrics. And so, to do that, you've got to make large investments with a long-term time horizon. And I think there are really strong precedents for this kind of orientation in other parts of technology, right? You saw Uber do it in transportation, Amazon and commerce, SpaceX and aerospace. We're taking a similar approach to energy where we're making 10, 20-year investments both in terms of the technology that we're developing, but also in terms of how we think about policy. And I think that this long-term orientation is long-term planning, whether it's building factories and building engineering teams and working on new technology that's never been done in this industry, or it's kind of mapping the policy road map to, what does the grid of 2040, 2050 look like? That's where we spend our time, less about the 18 months, 24 months, 36-month timeframe. So that's kind of how we think about the problem. All right. So let's come back to this. I want to ask you something. I saw a quote you gave in Texas Monthly. It was an article about restructuring that Russell Gold did. He quoted you as saying, Erkott doesn't put up roadblocks. It removes them. This is a very, yes, you remember saying this? When was this article? It was 2023. Yeah. Well, it might have a different response. Well, that's what I want to ask you. Is that still the case? And I'm curious, like, what are the emerging technologies you're working on? Where are their roadblocks that are actively being removed and you're excited? And where are their roadblocks that actually we need? There's been a lot of talk here last couple days about stakeholder process, collaboration. I think Erkott is a great place for that. So what are some of those roadblocks that need to be removed to get these next emerging technologies to market? Sure. And I certainly don't want to point fingers at Erkott. Erkott has a lot on their plate. I am not one of the projects that's in the queue directly impacted by some of the stuff going on. It's a broader issue outside of Erkott. I think Erkott is also sometimes maybe doesn't get the right direction or other things. So certainly don't want to take a controversial position on that. In terms of where these roadblocks are, I think the roadblock largely right now is in my eyes like a process driven roadblock, right? We again work on a lot of large load projects. Some of these large loads are located behind the meter, private use networks. Some are just large loads trying to get interconnected that might have been further along in the interconnect process. And now are going through a re-study. And when I think about the challenges to getting our portfolio done, it's really just clarity on what do we need to do? Like what are the steps to get there? And what is the process to get there? And it sounds like a very simple resolution, but I think everybody here who's stuck in that would probably say, yeah, that's what I don't understand is what's the process to get there. So it feels as if there needs to be some effort to really look at like, again, I know I'm pointing out the obvious people work on this every day, an overhaul to the process and how we approach this problem. You know, we're going through standard or normal means whether it's the standard rulemaking process, rather, I understand that there's regulatory requirements. But perhaps we approach this challenge differently. Everybody's confused on how to move forward. Nobody's quite sure on where project stands. That seems to be the challenge right now, a large challenge. Maybe we look at that differently because it doesn't seem like we have a resolution insight. And to us, that's the biggest question. That's the question of how many of those gigawatts get built, right? Like that's the question we're all asking is what's going to get built and the question of what's getting built is I don't quite know what's getting studied or how I have to get the study to understand what capacity I have so that I can actually go get lending and actually get it built by 2027 or by the timeline that I need. So to us, this is a process conversation. Like the innovation needs to happen from how we are deploying and how we are understanding what that process is to get a large project built. Yeah. And obviously, like when you said that a couple of years ago, right? Like these new data centers were kind of a gleam in everybody's eye. It was starting to be talked about a little bit, but only barely. Yeah. The technologies I was worried back in 2023. We were working a lot with everybody on the stage and having conversations about residential size technologies. And how do we get an integrated home into the market, right? Something that wraps in the electricity bill very similar to the value proposition energy well and base are offering. Like how do we get those types of technologies into the market? To me, Erkott still is a great playground to have those conversations. I think Erkott and the DG, the DER space and the work that we've done over the past decade has been a really great welcoming space to bring these technology and resources in. I'd ask smart leaders to make it hugely enabling technology that a lot of other markets don't have. We've done a great job at that. And Erkott's done a great job at that. And they have a lot of innovation in that space. And I love working on those technologies with these people for that reason. The challenge that we have again is back on large load right now. And large load is shifting this market so dramatically, because one data center is the equivalent of a huge aggregation. So yeah. And Tom, let's actually go to you next sort of picking up on that. You were saying, do you say smart meters and smart meters, Texas? So this is something I've been kind of obsessing about lately. I did a podcast with Sonan and Blake Ricotta, he had this great phrase where he said, shape load perfectly inject energy optimally. I've been thinking about that a lot because that's really like what is going to happen on the resident. There's so much, I think in the common understanding and even in industry circles that like customers aren't going to do this stuff because you're asking them to do some. When you're talking about shaping load, a lot of that is going to be done by the very AI we're talking about, right? And try to accommodate. Can you talk a little bit about the innovation and mass market retail? You have a lot of experience in that area. Yeah, just to, you know, have to pick up on the threat that Mara started earlier, the smart meter ubiquity throughout the market, the way that ERCOT transparently settles load to those meters, enables a lot of, you know, product design innovation, at least in our market. I think what we've moved to now, you know, I think early product design that leveraged smart meter Texas was really like, you know, build design driven or, you know, things like TOU products, index products. We've moved past that. I think there's some interesting learnings there, but you know, the future of leveraging this type of technology is I think going to be done by physical products that make the market participation of mass market customers effectively effortless or invisible to them. You know, Blake's point about perfectly shaping load and optimally dispatching is, I think kind of echoing the earlier point about lifting the system load factor out things is more efficiently using the grid that we have, you know, Zach's going to be able to go into much more detail about the specific battery operations behind a company like that. But I think they're all related and whether it's whole home batteries or, you know, whole circuit batteries that are starting to come to the market or smart thermostats or smart EV charging or, you know, any of the things like that, they're all kind of sitting on the same baseline technology of optimizing interval level usage to respond to price signals. And these are resources that we've like barely tapped at all. Like even on cars, I'm kind of amazed at like, just think it talked about a lot, but there's more than, it's a rough back of the envelope, but there's probably about 20 to 25 gigawatt hours of batteries rolling around at four wheels in the state of Texas right now. And we're just like charging them this is an opinion, but I think part of the reason we haven't seen more done with that data is just that for the most part, you know, people don't want to think about this stuff. They get home from work and they turn on their stove or have to do their laundry, right? They don't want to check the app for price signals. And so we've been lucky to have, you know, this kind of multi-year environment with a couple of hiccups of very low pricing, especially relative to the rest of the country. And so it hasn't spurred the type of innovation that you may expect. I think recent challenges around resiliency and some concern about what future volatility looks like is leading to kind of a different approach now, where we'll see more physical products come to the market. So Zach, I think that's like a perfect tea up to ask you about, you know, again, the last couple days like there has been a very consistent theme through all the different sessions. It was and how it loses keynote yesterday, flexibility, flexibility, flexibility, right? And so the demand side has this enormous potential. You guys are focused on that residential mass market. Can you talk a little bit about the flexibility that you're bringing to market, pick up on those themes of what are you seeing consumers actually want out of this? And also, I'm just interested also from you in kind of like how the go-to-market is working as far as competitive versus vertically integrated, because I know you guys are doing some in both. So if you're mind addressing that too. A couple of questions there. I'll try to touch on all of them. I think the panel kind of touch on this like what do customers want? This is a pretty simple question to answer. They want their bills to go down and their lights to stay on, right? So price is down, reliability up. And that's really our North Star as a business. How do you achieve this kind of flexible, reliable outcome at the max? You have the biggest possible battery on the home, right? So we make the biggest battery in the market. Our next generation battery will be an even larger battery, right? So why? Well, because we want to add as much capacity to the grid as possible. That capacity can be used to take the home off the grid in times of high prices. That capacity can be used to serve the grid in the same times. But more capacity is better, right? So that's really how we think about it. I think it's pretty straightforward. In terms of go to market, the way we think about this is we have one technology stack hardware software firmware. We can talk about that. It's vertically integrated. And we're building a factory and all that fun stuff. But the whole technology stack is aimed at these North stars of price down reliability up. That's true in our deregulated gentailer business. And that's true in our utility partnership business where we go provide that same technology stack, the hardware, the software, the firmware to regulated utilities. And then they get to go deploy that technology in our service territory to do what? To drive prices down and to drive reliability up, right? So it's the same value proposition, same technology stack different business model. We think that the long term future of the company actually is more so focused on being a technology vendor to the utilities than just a deregulated gentailer in Texas. And we'll grow the gentailer business in Texas. We'll do it in other markets. We might do it in other countries, but the vast majority of the grid in the United States and the world is regulated. And for good reason, right? And we can talk about why. And so we want to be the preferred partner of those utilities and really their outsourced R&D function. So the technology is the same, the value proposition is the same, the business model is just a little bit different. Can you just, I don't know if you can't answer this. Can't answer the size of the batteries. You said they're getting bigger. Like what are we talking about? Yep. So our current product is a 25 kilowatt hour system that we primarily, if there's room and the customer wants it, which is typically due, we install in parallel. So it gets you to 50 kilowatt hours. You get a couple days, even then fairly exciting. Our next generation product is a 40 kilowatt hour battery that we again install in parallel, often to get you to 80 kilowatt hours. So that's massive amounts of capacity on a per-home basis. And then we've recently announced our generator integrated product. So we actually have a portable generator integration for our current product where you can take a 500-dollar portable generator that you can buy on Amazon and you can plug it into your base battery. Obviously that portable generator isn't able to power the whole home, right? But the base battery is. And you can use that generator to charge your battery to keep you powered through a long duration outage. So we'll continue to develop new technology like this to extend duration and more capacity on a per-home basis, which we think really is the way to solve kind of both of these problems that you're highlighting. Before we go to Hayden, I just also want to give folks a sense of the scale of this because I sort of hear this a lot. I was like, well, we're doing so many batteries on the book side. What is the demand side? Can you talk about the scale? You've reached so far and kind of the pace you're going at as far as adding this. Yeah, we're going fast. We've got over 100 megawatt hours on the grid here in Texas. We're rapidly approaching 200 megawatt hours. We're adding over 20 a month. And we think around this time next year will be on the order of 100 a month. So we're building a factory here in Austin capable of four gigawatt hours a year. That would be our first factory, which is really a kind of not a prototype factory, but a way for us to we think about things in terms of crawl, walk, run. So develop the technology, test it, then make sure it works and scale it up. So factory one will be sizable four gigawatt hours is not small. Factory two will be much larger. We're already thinking about that and making some investments in that direction that we'll be able to talk more publicly about soon. But yeah, I mean, I think we're the fastest growing battery developer in the state certainly in probably the country. And we'll you know, continue to grow that deployment rate over the next couple of months. And part of my reason asking that question is I just I'm hoping to the audience of the room and to those that are listening to the podcast like the scale of this is really starting to I'm hoping it's starting to take hold with folks like the podcast I have coming out tomorrow, but Travis Kavula from NRG, they've got a one gigawatt VPP. They're working on he said on that podcast. They were like it, I think at 150 or something like that at this 150 somewhere in their megawatts already. You've obviously got Tesla out there David and octopus. We are starting to see gigawatt scale. There's already six gigawatts that distributed assets already out there that are caught as measured. So when we're talking about these large numbers of growth on the bulk system, we also need to be thinking about the distributed system as scaling. All right, Hayden, I want to ask you something sort of it's obviously related, but a little bit different and actually hasn't been talked about a ton at the conference here, but you know, it's a big deal in Texas and nationally is the repeal of the IRA. What does that mean for you guys and you're changing business and sort of the pace and economics of building a new gen in our cop? Sure. Well, that's a really easy one. I'll take that one ahead on. Sure. So, you know, there's probably folks that are on both sides of it, you know, one side, you know, we want like large degrees of security on the other side. There's a lot of people who just don't let the roles to change. So yeah, you know, I understand both sides of people who want it and don't want it. I'm really glad that I get to be in the position of someone who gets to respond rather than having to make the decision on a election situation. So I get to, you know, Monday morning quarterback over here, but you know, I think that ultimately what happens is it levels the playing field and in doing so, it creates more competition and it allows there to just be a lot of innovation in the best business model, wins, and you get to figure out what that is. And that's happening in real time and it allows, you know, smart, humble teams to be really creative and push innovation into the space. So I think ultimately customers, whenever there's a lot more competition. So that's great. I think that, you know, in doing so, we like to be highly competitive ourselves and, you know, the best way you can do that serving power is you can either figure out ways to make more money or you can figure out ways to save money. And so figuring out ways that we can, you know, synergize our operations. We are vertical. We do our own EPC. We try to have the lowest net build cost out there. And so that's really something that we'll be focused on. You know, it's easier to save a dollar than to just earn one because earning one's risky and other things. So you see one of the main things about the repeal of the IRA being sort of driving efficiency driving efficiency. But, you know, that's on one side. Efficiency is on one side of it. We're cost savings is on one side of it. You know, another thing is, you know, we really focus on the DG level. So we're deploying 9.9 megawatt assets. And, you know, what I rather have 100 megawatt or 200 megawatt asset or 10 10 megawatts or 20 10 megawatts, I think I would take seven 10 megawatt sites over 100 just because you get diversification of risk and the portfolio effect. But with that being said, we're more so looking at this 9.9 megawatts of interconnection capacity as a resource. And, you know, the prior business models of the past are not set up for the future. And we are pairing resources. We are stacking advantages to be prepared for these non-scarce years, such as 2020, 2020, 25. We were really focusing on the intrinsic value of the assets that we're building. And if they're not under-ridable from an intrinsic view, it's not something that we're interested in. So we're really trying to create more value and being more innovative in our own deployments in order to survive those years. And, you know, we somehow entered the data center space really couldn't help ourselves who came by it, honestly, came across a site that has literally everything you need 138, 345 KV lines plus three natural gas pipelines 20 minutes from a major metro area with a lot of acreage, right? It's, you know, something that we were like, hey, we've got to get involved at this. And even with everything on site, the data center world, it's complex. It's a very complex animal. And having to bring all the power behind the meter and the complexities of SB6 and how the TSP's are viewing load versus the code generation, it's creating a scenario where we're having to paint this power story and these systems are complex, especially getting them online. You know, so I think that I guy may have a few of our caught where, you know, maybe the demand story isn't so bullish. And maybe it's a bit more bearish because there's potential for delays for regulatory compliance and things of that nature. And what happens with all of these things, you know, these, it's a lot of demand, but they're all bringing really big plants behind them. What does that really look like? So we're having the view into kind of that demand side with still building generation assets. We're really preparing for non-scarish years and really focusing on intrinsic value. So that's kind of how, you know, a repeal of a certain regulation just kind of forces you to think differently across your entire business or folio. So all right. So in just a couple minutes, we'll go to questions from the audience. Before we do that, though, more I want to also ask you like related to that, right? Hayden's talking about a lot of the complexity that could really slow that down. I know that's like a lot of what you guys are dealing with. So you guys are putting together a dashboard to kind of like look at all the different things that are going on. So what do you see as you're talking to people out there as far as like what are those roadblocks? If you take more of a bearish case, you look at 2030, like we haven't built out as much data centers as we all maybe hoped or thought. What's kind of got in the way? And is that way we can sort of like anticipate it? Hopefully not let it happen. Sure. So if we get to 2030 and we're kind of cruising along, still seeing the same study, load growth, I think one of the things we need to clearly continue to evolve our data use and our data around some of these more remote sites. So one of the challenges we have is we're seeing a lot of load growth in remote areas. And as a result, we don't have the same quality of data that we were talking about earlier. We have wonderful quality of data on our residential loads, which is great because they drive a lot of the volatility in the market. We want to see how those behave. And again, the real-time behavior is really important on those. But at the same time, we also have a lot of these large loads. And sorry for being the large load voice on this panel, but we have a lot of these large loads where we don't have data visibility and granular visibility into what's happening. Not all these loads have an EPS meter or the right meter in infrastructure for us to see that data even five days in a rear if they don't have the telemetry or a queasy on site. And so I think as we continue to move forward, we have to understand how we use data better and we get good data off really important assets. Again, that sounds like a really obvious point, but it's not working well enough right now. So we need to continue to work on how we get data off some of these larger assets in the market. I think one of the other things that we want to be thinking through is also just we spend a lot of time in legal and in contracting and how you create contracts that are nimble and grow and evolve with the market as there are uncertain times. I think again through all these large loads and working through contracts that perhaps have tenor that extend beyond this five years that we're talking about. So how do you create a contract that is de-risk for all parties able to go get lending that also recognizes and acknowledges the market's going to change in the next five years and we don't know and the market's specifically going to change around things that impact your load. And so I think the other thing that we're trying to focus on is the perfection of contracting and how you create the right contract and documents set for a very, very boutique product. Every site has different needs, every site has different lenders, every site has different operations. So how do you evolve that contracting structure so that five years from now you've got all these participants in the market who've been trying to get in for five years, but in a structure that supports reliability, supports performance, doesn't drive VKs and bankruptcies and a whole another kind of next generation of problems to solve. That's really interesting. I think most people think about like the data problems as being more on the residential side. Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just like totally off the left field in this moment. I think of like for the big customers like data, something everybody's got, but it's a brave new world, right? These are developments like you said, 800 megawatts of even seen anything like this. We just launched a platform that we built off of our own internal operations because it's how we look at data and we really care about how these large loads behave and we really care about it at an interval basis. And when you don't have that data at an interval basis, what's the other data you need to look at? So it's something that we think is super important and we're trying to lend our learnings to the market to also have kind of the access to best data available today. So before we go to the questions, anything you all want to say in response to each other? I have a question about what you just brought up if you don't mind. So are you saying that let's say you have a very large load that is committed to be price responsive or something like that where you let's say you have a price spike, the large load curtail, but your initial data is going to show what that there's sometimes it shows in our large loads that that load never curtailed our initial settles. And again, I'm not trying to put our cotton hotspots so please don't take it that way. But sometimes based on the load profile based on again, the meter and the the communication available at that site that's available to the TBSP. It might not be the TBSP's fault. That load, we won't get actual meter data until that meter is read, you know, 30 days on the 30 day mark. And that's when we actually see out behaves. So our initial settles might not reflect a price responsive load actually curtailing. It might actually be settled off of a profile settlement, which is when you think about it, like these are really large loads, a big piece of huge dollars on the initial settle, but you're working capital flow to support that. Yep. All right. Okay. So let's go to some of the questions here. Let's see. So I'll go with the one that's upvoted the most in the room. No one seems to talk about the water issue. Seems to be a lack of water, which will prevent generation from coming online. It's also there's water you associated with data centers, obviously. So it's a really good point. Like water is often sort of overlooked in this. Anybody want to take that one? There's a reason we haven't talked about it. I guess none of us wanted to. I'm not a developer. I'm going to absolutely punt on the developers of those assets, but he do know through the permitting process and through a lot of the the HJs, they're looking at the water requirements. And I think there's a lot of technical evolution in terms of cooling technologies out there to require less water. Yeah. I'm certainly not an expert on this topic. There are some very smart people working on water problems in Texas. In fact, my sister is working on this and spending a lot of time thinking about it. Our generation technology requires 0.0 gallons of water. So there certainly are I think the cooling point Mars is a good one and that is the challenge of data center space. And you're looking, I mean, why is Northern Virginia a place where all these data centers go? There's a bunch of things. There's permitting things and real estate implications, but a lot of it is that the climate Texas is very hot as we all know. So you do have to cool down these GPUs and that does take a lot of water. But not all generation technologies do require water. Obviously data centers are not necessarily generation. They're load obviously. So, but yeah, it's a complicated problem and I certainly don't have any. But I do think it's a really important point. Like it's not actually talked about a lot with renewables and storage is that there really is minimal water there. Obviously water use is mostly like agricultural, but you know, the power sector is a slice. But it's other than like washing some panels and stuff like that, you do get major water savings from renewables. Do you want to say something on this one? Sure. Yeah. A lot of the data centers are moving to a closed loop designs to alleviate that. So, you know, they're building these sinks in the desert. But, you know, on the power genside, you know, a lot of the behind the meter thermal. I mean, there's certainly a requirement where you need water to operate those. And I think the trade-off there, right? If you're like reusing the water, you're going to use more power because you've got to keep that water cool, right? So there's these trade-offs that happen there, right? And some assets use more than others too. So, you know, if you're using different types of thermal required different levels of steam, so... All right. Somebody's asking a question to me that got upvoted. Is this a tough question? Should I ask myself a little bit what? What would be your one policy you'd implement if Texas, if you could? A carbon tax? No. Incented for clean dispatchable resources, there has to be some ambitious policy post IRA. What is it? So, I would think probably half this group can probably guess what I'll say, which would be a real focus on getting rid of resistance heat and putting in high-efficiency heat pumps. And I'd like to see that done with market-based solutions where we actually have some price discovery where it's not just like pick a price and pay this incentive. We don't know where we're paying too much. Are we paying too little? Introduce some competition into the demand side. But I'm supposed to be the moderator. And y'all want to say anything about that? Well, yeah, go back to your point. I agree with you. I think the resistance heating or just inefficient heating in general in the mass market space is a serious issue that we see in risk management and load forecasting and stuff like that. And so, I agree completely. And it very much relates to what we were talking about earlier with like shape load, you know, perfectly eject energy optimally. Like you're not shaping load perfectly. If in the wintertime a house is using 10 KW and an apartment's using 5 KW all through the night, like we're not shaping that load and it's those peaks that we've got to be able to manage to be able to bring data centers and all kinds of other stuff on. Okay, there's one for Zach. Zach, when are you expanding to California? We're working on it. We will share more about our expansion plans outside of Texas in the coming months, but we're talking to regulated utilities in a number of states that have expressed interest in our technology. California being near the top of the list. So I don't have a firm date for you. My hope is 2026. I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to I'm quite confident that we'll be moving outside of Texas in 2026. I'm hopeful that California will be one of those states because California is a place that obviously has a massive need for batteries given the penetration of solar. There's a question from the audience. Bales outlook is pretty bearish about demand growth and Irkaut, but bullish on the technological innovations on the supply side will the technology be deployed without the demand? I think so. That's what Irkuts known for back to that earlier comment that I still stand by from 2023. Irkuts are right place for experimenting with products and technology and testing how a market responds. I think as we introduce new price signals, we'll start testing other ways new technologies behave with the RTC plus B. What does that do? Does that introduce new technical innovation? But I think we continue to be really right for that. Yeah, I don't think anyone's bearish load growth. I mean, load growth is already here, right? And so, I mean, the existing infrastructure is aging. Load growth has happened. There's questions about how much future load growth there will be, which I think are valid given the state of the interconnection queue, but yeah, just I wanted to push back on bearish load growth. I think that the projections are what 100% increase by five years or something. So, I mean, I think that it's the relative nature of it is maybe where we should backtrack the pace of this, but the growth is still going to be very, very, very high relatively. So, I wouldn't say the outlook is bearish. Yeah, I would go back to the first one I made, which is we think more about 24 to 2030. So, yeah, we're going to continue building technology to drive price down and reliability up. And what happens next year in the following year matters, but it's not really where we're focused. We're making long-term bets. And I think my hope is that other technology companies take the same approach, because that has worked out really well in other industries. Yeah, I think the only bearishness you're probably hearing is just like how are all these rules around SB6 going to get worked out? There's a lot of uncertainty. Is that going to kind of slow things down, but to your point, like 25% increase, we're like 400 terawatt hours, four years ago, we're at 500, we're probably going to be just short of 500 terawatt hours in 2025. Again, I think we need to think big, like maybe even doubling that number in a six to 10 year kind of a horizon, but really managing that peak. We get to where we're doubled the peak, but not like triple the consumption, then we've done something very wrong. All right, more ahead in time. Zach, please join me in thanking the panel for a great discussion. Thanks for tuning in to the Energy Capital podcast. If you got something out of this conversation, please share the podcast with a friend, family member, or colleague, and subscribe to the newsletter at dugluan.com. That's where you'll find all the stories where I break down the biggest things happening in Texas energy, national energy policy, markets, technology policy, it's all there. You can also follow along at LinkedIn. You can find me there and at Twitter, dugluan energy, as well as YouTube, dugluan energy. Please follow me in all the places. Big thanks to Nathan, PV, our producer for making these episodes sound so crystal clear and good. And to Ari, Lewin, for writing the music. Until next time, please stay curious and stay engaged. Let's keep building a better energy future. Thanks for listening.