Last month I had the opportunity to record a long conversation with one of my favorite observers of the energy world: Doug Lewin.

Doug is the author of the outstanding Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, a sharp observer and clear critical thinker about the particularities of his own state’s massive energy system, and a wonderful writer to boot. 

Texas really is its own electricity market, in both its size, its growth rate, its abundant supply and its soaring demand, and perhaps most importantly, its governance. It can be tempting to view it entirely as its own creature, without a strong predictive value for anywhere else. But, that would be a mistake. I listen to Doug’s weekly recordings and read his more-than-weekly writing precisely because I believe that what happens in this large and liquid laboratory for policy, technology, and markets will resonate elsewhere, and sooner rather than later. 

Obviously we talked a lot about…Texas, and for good reason. Here’s a slide from six weeks ago showing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ large load interconnection queue. As of September, it had reached 189 gigawatts, tripling in the course of 12 months (no points, readers, for correctly guessing what particular type of large load is the majority of requests).

In fact, this slide is already (somewhat) out of date. ERCOT’s October monthly operational update shows 205 gigawatts of large load interconnection requests! We have that update in our system already — if you are logged in and using Halcyon Search, you can see it here. 

As fun as it was to dive deep into Texas, we also cast a wide aperture in our conversation, outside the borders of the Lone Star State and ERCOT. And, we both talked about the nature of our work, about building information systems with different foci and different scales, and about the persistent and healthy challenge of bringing the right, and most useful, information to those who need it most.    

There’s an echo of what we do in that sentiment, too. At Halycon, we have customers who use our Search capability every day to learn more about their home market — and we have others who use the same capability to learn more about what their markets do next. That’s one of the marvels of an information system, to me: the same quanta, the same facts, can be used with equal fidelity for very different purposes.

You can find the podcast here as well as at all the usual places. Please give it a listen — and please give Doug’s work a read too.

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