Sep 26, 2026 | Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
When a power grid gets close to running short, Texas does not pay anyone to keep a plant on standby. It raises the price instead. The Operating Reserve Demand Curve — the ORDC — adds an automatic premium to real-time electricity as spare capacity shrinks, climbing...
Sep 24, 2026 | Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
An energy-only market pays a power plant for one thing: the electricity it actually generates, priced moment to moment. A capacity market pays it twice — once for that energy, and again, years in advance, simply for promising to be available when demand peaks. That...
Sep 21, 2026 | Battery Technology, Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
Texas has built the largest grid-battery fleet in the United States — roughly 21 GW of operating capacity by mid-2026, against California’s 17 GW — and it did so with no storage mandate, no capacity market and no climate target. The lesson the rest of the...
Sep 14, 2026 | Renewable Energy, Smartgrids
In the United States the wait to plug a power plant into the grid is now longer than the time it takes to build one. Roughly 2,000 gigawatts of generation and storage — more than the entire installed US power fleet — sits in interconnection queues, and of every...
Sep 12, 2026 | Policy & Regulations, Renewable Energy, Solar
States that voted for Trump in 2024 installed 71% of the new solar capacity the United States added in the first half of 2026, according to SEIA and Wood Mackenzie’s latest Solar Market Insight report. Texas alone built 3.44 gigawatts, more than the next two...
