Texas has spent decades building transmission to serve load growth. The pattern worked when growth rose steadily with new homes, oil and gas operations, and the gradual expansion of the state’s industrial base. It is being tested by a different kind of customer: data centers requesting interconnection at a scale that exceeds what the grid can physically deliver. Eric Goff, founder of Goff Policy and a long-time participant in the ERCOT stakeholder process, walks through how the system is adapting. The current large load queue sits above 400 gigawatts, a number Goff describes as effectively infinite because the constraint is infrastructure, not demand. In an interview with host Joshua Rhodes, Eric covers a lot of ground, including: * How the batch zero policy, now working its way through ERCOT governance, would replace one-off utility studies with a single, system-wide study and a constructable transmission plan. * How the decision to build 765 kV transmission compares to the 138 and 345 kV shifts of past generations. * How Senate Bill 6 gave ERCOT and utilities multiple tools to disconnect large loads before emergencies. * Why artificial intelligence hyperscalers behave differently than the crypto miners that came before them, with a value-of-lost-load above the wholesale price cap. * Whether a minimum transmission charge can protect existing rate payers as new load arrives. Goff argues the infrastructure decisions Texas makes now will determine whether the data center build-out lowers per-unit costs for everyone or shifts them onto residential consumers. Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios. Timestamps * 00:00 - Introduction & Eric Goff * 02:36 - How Policy Gets Made in ERCOT * 06:35 - What’s Actually Driving Load Growth * 09:18 - Is the 435 GW Queue Real? * 10:41 - Inside the Batch Zero Process * 14:21 - Building Transmission for Load, Not Generation * 16:56 - Large Load Flexibility and Controllable Load * 18:18 - SB6 and the Power to Curtail * 22:38 - The Dispatchable Campus Idea * 27:27 - Does Transmission Planning Need to Change? * 32:32 - Paying for Transmission: 4CP, 12CP, and a Minimum Charge * 39:39 - Five Years Out: Betting on Infrastructure Resources People & Organizations * Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn) * Webber Energy Group (Website - LinkedIn) * IdeaSmiths (Website - LinkedIn) * Eric Goff (LinkedIn) * Goff Policy (Website - LinkedIn) Company & Industry News * ERCOT files Planning Guide Revision Request 145 for Batch Zero * ERCOT Board approves $9.4B 765-kV Eastern Backbone project (RTO Insider) * PUCT approves first 765-kV transmission lines in ERCOT region * Texas lawmakers push back on 765-kV transmission plan (KXAN) Books & Articles Discussed * Texas Senate Bill 6, 89th Legislature * ERCOT Planning Guide Revision Request 145, Batch Zero Process for Large Load Interconnections * ERCOT Permian Basin Reliability Plan Study * PJM proposal to transition away from capacity market Related Podcasts by Energy Capital * The New Rules Behind ERCOT Prices, with Andrew Reimers * Texas Growth Running Into Grid Limits, with Katie Coleman * The Data Behind Texas Reliability, with Max Kanter Transcript THE ENERGY CAPITAL PODCAST Eric Goff, Founder of Goff Policy Host: Joshua Rhodes Joshua Rhodes: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Energy Capital Podcast. I’m really excited to have Eric Goff, the founder of Goff Policy here, to basically tell us how ERCOT works. Eric is one of the smartest people out there when it comes to kind of the current comings and goings in and around ERCOT. Deeply involved in a lot of the policy and a lot of the procedures and a lot of other things happening. Eric founded Goff Policy in 2019. Before that, he had seven years at Citigroup in energy trading, market operations, earlier roles at NRG Energy and Reliant and Constellation. He’s been a longtime participant in the ERCOT stakeholder governance system. He serves as past chair of multiple ERCOT subcommittees and working groups and up until just recently served as a sole representative for Texas residential consumers at the ERCOT Technical Advisory Committee appointed by the Office of Public Utility Counsel. The firm has grown significantly in the past couple of years. You’ve been spreading into Western markets. You’ve been hosting symposiums and all kinds of things. Eric, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. Eric Goff: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. I appreciate the invitation. Joshua Rhodes: Yeah, no, absolutely. So as I do with most people when I’m going through their LinkedIn before talking, I actually came across something I did not know about you is that did you really co-found compost peddlers? Eric Goff: I did with my friend Dustin Fedakko. Joshua Rhodes: Okay, so I don’t know if we’ve talked about this. Maybe we have. I was in East Austin at around that time and I saw your guys, maybe you, I don’t know, like riding these modified cargo bikes with basically blue barrels carrying compost around. Was that you? Eric Goff: That’s right. That was us. We had, we called everyone the peddler. And I did some of the compost shifts, but we had part-time and full-time peddlers and launched it before we had municipal composting in Austin. And I think that maybe the best thing to say is that we accelerated the city’s own plans to municipal composting. Joshua Rhodes: Right, right, right. It was just funny. Just, remember one time thinking, and this was also with like PediCab folks around that time before like e-bikes really kind of made it into where they’re the most fit people in the world riding tens of miles a day carrying heavy loads. It was insane. Eric Goff: Yeah. Some of the hard part too is because it’s just pure literally inertia with another maybe grid thing, but you have to stop the bike and start the bike and stop the bike and start the bike with many, many pounds of compost in that barrel. Joshua Rhodes: It was insane. All right. So I’ve already burned enough of our precious time talking about, but inertia is a good tie in. We’re going to get to the grid. So Eric, you do a lot of policy, a lot of policy consulting, a lot of policy work in ERCOT. For folks that either don’t live inside the ERCOT stakeholder world, which is the vast majority of people on this planet, how does policy actually get made in ERCOT? Where does it start and where does it continue? Eric Goff: Sure. It’s a unique system that doesn’t exist in many other locations. And it’s changed some. I’m sure we’ll get into that since Winter Storm Uri happened. Historically, the energy companies in Texas, going back to the 90s at least, I wasn’t in the business then, so I’ve been told, were active in working together to establish what ERCOT would be and do. And they established this stakeholder process. At the time, it had a stakeholder board and it operated by having like a balance and continues to have a balanced group of buyers and sellers that many recommendations at the time of decisions. And if anyone doesn’t like something, you can appeal that to the public utility commission. But the process drives consensus because you have to get along long-term with your peers. Right. And so many things don’t end up being appealed to the utility commission. They just kind of get worked out. Everyone leaves a little bit dissatisfied, but it’s an effective process. Since Winter Storm Uri, for good reason, people were upset about how the process was working and, you know, there’s a lot of finger pointing. And so there was significant change to the process. So now everything goes to the utility commission ultimately. And the stakeholder process is more of like an advisory role to the commission. Joshua Rhodes: Okay. And so are these the groups, the technical advisory committees, correct me if I’m saying these wrongs, and these working groups like the large load working groups, is this kind of where all of this is the negotiations happen and things are made? Eric Goff: So ERCOT has offices in Austin and those meetings are technically open to the public, but they’re also broadcast online. State law has required that TAC, which is the senior stakeholder group, as well as the ERCOT board, have been accessible on the internet so anyone can follow along. During COVID, some people just kind of dialed in for fun. But the process has dozens of people in some cases, for many of these large load questions, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that dial in to listen. But it’s many of the same people that speak that are kind of established figures in the stakeholder process have been around for a while. Joshua Rhodes: In general, like, is the policy that comes out of these things, I mean, there’s negotiations, there’s consensus or some form of consensus or some things like that. How quickly are these groups able to move? I know there’s a lot of pressure right now on figuring a lot of things out that I want to get to, but how quickly are these groups able to move to make new policy? Eric Goff: It depends on the issue. Historically, when I say historically, I’m going to typically mean like before Winter Storm Uri and after Winter Storm Uri. But before Uri, a lot of it was stakeholder driven and led. Then when the new commission and new board and new CEO came in to kind of right the ship with ERCOT and the grid, a lot more became. Joshua Rhodes: Three years ago. Okay. Yeah Eric Goff: led by ERCOT staff. Today it’s largely similar to how other independent system operators work, where the staff will recommend something, bring it to the stakeholders and ERCOT board and to the commission. And there’s back and forth dialogue among all three groups. I don’t think it’s more efficient than it used to be, but it is more public process. Joshua Rhodes: Okay, well there’s some trade-offs there, I guess. I want to jump into probably one of the biggest, the hottest butto
