Texas is among the states seeing the fastest-growing energy demands, with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) working to expand grid operations and meet customers' electricity needs.

ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas comes on Market Domination Overtime to talk about how the council is planning to satisfy grid demands

"Now we're starting to see some of these larger loads coming in faster, like the data centers," Vegas says about AI data centers' expected strain on power grids. "And what we've been doing is we've been planning for this eventuality over the last several years. We are seeing tremendous growth in renewables on the electric grid."

He explains one aspect of the regulatory process that allows the Texas grid to get ahead of power consumption strains:

"One of the things we do is a process that we call 'connect and manage,' where when a generator wants to come onto the grid, we do not require if there's the potential for any transmission level constraints for that generator, we don't require the whole transmission system to be upgraded before that generator can come online. A lot of other parts of the US do require that, and that's what can take so many years in other parts of the US to develop new power supply."

Pablo advises other states' operators to "be nimble" on their regulatory processes and try to find "balance" in growing power supplies, maintaining reliability on said sources.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.