Total ERCOT load is going from 85 GW in 2024 to 150 GW in 2030. That is almost doubling the load in 6 years. Think of the entire electrical infrastructure that has been built from Nikola Tesla to 2024 must be doubled in 6 years.

https://www.nerc.com/globalassets/who-we-are/standing-committees/rstc/llwg/lltf_april_meeting__technical_workshop_presentations_.pdf





Where is the generation coming from? Inverter Based Resources.



I posted last year the challenges in interconnecting these sources. https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3536623

This caused a large blackout in Brazil which was presented this year at the Texas A&M relay conference.
https://selinc.com/api/download/141260/
The abrupt voltage reduction observed after the loss of a single transmission line was a consequence of the unexpected performance of wind and photovoltaic farms observed in the field, far below that obtained by the National System Operator (ONS) in its power system studies, which are carried out using mathematical models sent by the transmission and generation asset owners to ONS.

What stocks should I buy to take advantage of this? What companies / industries stock prices will see the biggest gains from this?

edit: - Yukon, you had the same thought.

AES Corp?

Yukon Cornelius said:

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Who to invest in?

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Micro power plants?
https://www.papercitymag.com/culture/houston-electricity-winter-storm-southern-smoke-adam-sinn/

Yukon Cornelius said:

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Who to invest in?

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Companies that manufacture HV breakers (ABB), transformers (Virginia Transformer, GE Vernova), capacitor banks (Hitachi, Siemens), overhead conductor (Southwire), and MV cable (Okonite).

Companies that build substations (Quanta, MasTec).

Companies that manufacture inverters (Sungrow, SMA).

Utlities (Duke, ConEd, AEP).

Surprised geothermal was not mentioned as a method to increase the baseload dispatchable power. The EGS/AGS technologies are progressing fast. Lots of non-hydrotherm power options on the horizon with EGS. Some are being discussed as direct use by the datacenters so maybe ERCOT doesn't capture that data as it technically wouldn't make it to the grid.

We should be building Natural Gas power plants like crazy and let Datacenters pay for the lion's share of it. It's in everyone's interest as they need reliable power and Texans will revolt if prices spike or we have blackouts. NG is the best solution for putting up quick and fairly clean power plants and we have massive NG resources. In the meantime we should still explore nuclear and solar but nuclear takes a long time and solar doesn't work at night (though we have lots of land in West Texas that gets great sun exposure and doesn't have much value).

Politics will rule the day on this though.

AI has never felt like a bubble to me.

Datacenter buildout and power usage feels like a bubble to me.

By the time many of these GPUs are delivered, they'll be obselete. The power usage per unit of output today will be drastically higher than it will be in 2030.

Peak oil was a thing given a hard limit on technology. We blew that tech barrier to smithereens with fracking. Power usage for computing output will be much the same in my opinion. The ERCOT forecast tells you what people plan to build under 2024 efficiency assumptions. I don't think those assumptions survive contact with this/next years hardware economics - particularly if distilled models, edge inference and on-device computer shifts computing load from data center to personal devices.

Even personal device utilization at the margins versus datacenter I think shifts the demand curve meaningfully.

If that holds true, and all that new load is primarily dependent on solar and battery....then good luck.

At the rate we're moving, I feel like by the time they complete these gigantic data centers they won't be needed. Googles turboquant is going to shift things quite a bit once fully released later this year. We'll continue with refining compression methods exponentially I bet.

The other thing on these data centers is that some / many of them are vaporware and won't be built. Local municipalities and states have begun to fight these. One of the NE states just became the first state to ban new data center builds.

The one planned for Sulphur Springs, TX is in a major dispute now and may not be completed.

Dr. Venkman said:

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Yukon Cornelius said:

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Who to invest in?

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Companies that manufacture HV breakers (ABB), transformers (Virginia Transformer, GE Vernova), capacitor banks (Hitachi, Siemens), overhead conductor (Southwire), and MV cable (Okonite).

Companies that build substations (Quanta, MasTec).

Companies that manufacture inverters (Sungrow, SMA).

Utlities (Duke, ConEd, AEP).

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Interesting. I'll look into these.

More farmers will get loaded selling the family farm they can't pay their kids to visit.

More broke people that won't make the farmer a better offer will bellyache about the destruction of the family farm.

Rancher I know sold 300 momma cows and signed a solar lease paying them 750k a year. Everyone's mad, no one offered them 751k a year to keep ranching

Another case for mass remigration. Home prices will go down. Energy costs will go down. Fewer student drivers on the roads.

We are seeing massive growth in our industry, which is the communications networks that support the energy grid. We went from a general power demand stagnation over the last 20 years to all of sudden trying to not only make up for that period, but get ahead of the increases, and doing it all in a 3-5 year window.

Our utility clients are recognizing a 5-10x capital budget increase for communication infrastructure, and we are actively exploring private broadband buildouts for several major IOUs. Hundreds of millions of dollars just for the spectrum, and the same for the system (Core, RAN, towers, etc.).

Ericsson & Nokia are going to do well over the next few years.

NoahAg said:

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aggie93 said:

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We should be building Natural Gas NUCLEAR power plants like crazy and let Datacenters pay for the lion's share of it. It's in everyone's interest as they need reliable power and Texans will revolt if prices spike or we have blackouts. NG is the best solution for putting up quick and fairly clean power plants and we have massive NG resources. In the meantime we should still explore nuclear and solar but nuclear takes a long time and solar doesn't work at night (though we have lots of land in West Texas that gets great sun exposure and doesn't have much value).

Politics will rule the day on this though.

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FIFY.
Nuclear is the best. Safest. Cleanest. Best. Option.

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Nuclear is great but a very long timeline and lots of regulatory steps, I'm in favor of both but NG can get up and running faster and will run no matter the weather like nuclear. Now if we can get to the point where we can get nuclear plants up and running quickly and efficiently that's great but what we don't want is to put all our eggs in that basket and they get delayed and we are screwed.

A lot of these data centers will never be built. Some under construction have already scaled back.

A lot of them will be built. Texas will have a higher hit rate than other states.

Yukon Cornelius said:

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Who to invest in?

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SMR

Dr. Venkman said:

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Total ERCOT load is going from 85 GW in 2024 to 150 GW in 2030. That is almost doubling the load in 6 years. Think of the entire electrical infrastructure that has been built from Nikola Tesla to 2024 must be doubled in 6 years.

https://www.nerc.com/globalassets/who-we-are/standing-committees/rstc/llwg/lltf_april_meeting__technical_workshop_presentations_.pdf





Where is the generation coming from? Inverter Based Resources.



I posted last year the challenges in interconnecting these sources. https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3536623

This caused a large blackout in Brazil which was presented this year at the Texas A&M relay conference.
https://selinc.com/api/download/141260/
The abrupt voltage reduction observed after the loss of a single transmission line was a consequence of the unexpected performance of wind and photovoltaic farms observed in the field, far below that obtained by the National System Operator (ONS) in its power system studies, which are carried out using mathematical models sent by the transmission and generation asset owners to ONS.

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In that graph on the right, anything with no studies submitted or under ERCOT review is essentially a coin flip and a roll of the dice on whether it actually becomes real. Transmission and generation capacity is not keeping up with that amount of increase in power demand.