Four Studies, Four Answers, and Why None of Them is Talking to The Others
“Did deregulation save Texans money?” has been argued in Texas for twenty-four years, and the argument has a structural defect. It is not one empirical question. It can mean an advertised offer, a bill actually paid, a residential revenue-per-kWh average, wholesale production cost, retail operating cost, a welfare counterfactual, or an avoided-investment claim. Four serious […]
What SB 1497 Actually Changed for Texas Brokers, Seven Years In
The line most often quoted from SB 1497 is eight words long: “A broker may not sell or take title to electric energy.” It is quoted so often that people assume it is the whole statute. It is not even the most operationally consequential part. What SB 1497 built, through the rules that implement it, […]
Looking Ahead: The ERCOT Market in 2027, 2028, and Beyond
Wrapping up the series with a forward look at the trends that will shape Texas electricity costs for the rest of the decade. Over the past nine weeks, we’ve worked through the structural realities of the ERCOT market: how prices are set, why summer 2026 looks the way it does, what Senate Bill 6 actually […]
Winter Storm Uri to Today: How ERCOT Has Actually Changed
Five years after February 2021, the question isn’t whether reforms happened — it’s whether they’re enough. February 2021 was the worst week in the history of the Texas grid. The combination of an extreme arctic event, widespread generation outages, frozen natural gas supply infrastructure, and inadequate weatherization left millions of Texans without power for days. […]
Demand Response and Curtailment: Turning Your Flexibility Into Revenue
ERCOT pays customers who can reduce load on demand. Here’s how the programs work and which ones actually fit Texas businesses. Most businesses think of electricity as a one-way relationship: you consume, you pay. But ERCOT operates several programs that flip that dynamic — paying customers who can reduce or shift load when the grid […]
Senate Bill 6 Explained: What Texas’s New Large-Load Rules Mean for Everyone Else
The 2025 law was written for data centers — but its consequences will reshape the market for every commercial and industrial customer. When the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 6 in the 2025 session, much of the public conversation focused on data centers and cryptocurrency miners. Both deserve the attention — they account for the […]
Renewables, Batteries, and the Texas Grid: Beyond the Headlines
Texas leads the nation in wind and solar — and is now scaling battery storage faster than anywhere else. What the actual numbers mean for reliability and prices. Texas is, by a wide margin, the largest wind power producer in the United States. It has been adding utility-scale solar at a pace that surprises even […]
Fixed vs. Indexed: How to Choose the Right Electricity Contract Structure
There is no single right answer — but there is a wrong one for your business. Here’s how to tell the difference. Walk into ten conversations with Texas commercial customers about their electricity contracts, and you’ll hear ten different philosophies. Some businesses lock in fixed prices for the longest term they can get. Others ride […]
Summer 2026: What the Reliability Outlook Really Tells You
Inside ERCOT’s Monthly Outlook for Resource Adequacy — and what it means for businesses bracing for another Texas summer. Every spring, the same question lands on the desk of every operations leader in Texas: is the grid going to hold up this summer? The honest answer is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and the […]
The Data Center Tsunami: What 200,000 Megawatts of New Load Means for Texas
ERCOT’s load forecast may be overstated — but even the conservative numbers reshape the market for every business in the state. In April 2026, ERCOT filed a preliminary long-term load forecast that landed like a thunderclap. The grid operator projected peak demand could reach 367,790 megawatts by 2032 — more than four times the all-time […]