The Woodlands-based Lancium has licensed patents to ERCOT that help increase or decrease power consumption during peak periods or emergencies. Photo courtesy of ERCOT

Lancium, a company based in The Woodlands that specializes in infrastructure for connecting large-scale data centers to power grids, is licensing a portfolio of patents to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) at no cost.

In a news release, Lancium says the intellectual property agreement “ensures ERCOT can sublicense these patents freely, thereby expanding market participation opportunities without risk of patent infringement disputes.”

“This agreement exemplifies Lancium’s dedication to supporting grid stability and innovation across the ERCOT region,” Michael McNamara, CEO of Lancium, said in a news release. “While these patents represent significant technological advancements, we believe that enabling ERCOT and its market participants to operate freely is more valuable for the long-term reliability and resilience of the Texas grid.”

The licensed patents encompass Lancium technologies that support load resources in ERCOT’s market, which covers about 90 percent of Texas. Specifically, the patents deal with controllable load resources. A controlled load resource allows ERCOT and other grids to increase or decrease power consumption during peak periods or emergencies.

ERCOT predicts power demand in Texas will nearly double by 2030, “in part due to more requests to plug into the grid from large users like data centers, crypto mining facilities, hydrogen production plants, and oil and gas companies,” The Texas Tribune reported.

CenterPoint Energy aims to complete its suite of grid resiliency projects before the 2025 hurricane season. Photo via centerpointenergy.com

CenterPoint reports progress on grid improvements ahead of 2025 hurricane season

grid resilience

As part of an ongoing process to make Houston better prepared for climate disasters, CenterPoint Energy announced its latest progress update on the second phase of the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI).

CenterPoint reported that it has completed 70 percent of its resiliency work and all GHRI-related actions are expected to be complete before the official start of the 2025 hurricane season.

"Our entire CenterPoint Houston Electric team is focused on completing this historic suite of grid resiliency actions before the start of hurricane season,” Darin Carroll, Senior Vice President of CenterPoint's Electric Business, said in a news release. “That is our goal, and we will achieve it. To date, we have made significant progress as part of this historic effort.”

CenterPoint’s resiliency solutions include clearing higher-risk vegetation across thousands of miles of power lines, adding thousands more automation devices capable of self-healing, installing thousands of storm-resistant poles, and undergrounding hundreds of miles of power lines.

CenterPoint's GHRI efforts, which entered a second phase in September 2024, aim to improve overall grid resiliency and reliability and are estimated to reduce outages for customers by more than 125 million minutes annually, according to the company. It has undergrounded nearly 350 miles of power lines, about 85 percent of the way toward its target of 400 miles, which will help improve resiliency and reduce the risk of outages. CenterPoint also aims to install the first of 100 new local weather monitoring stations by June 1.

In March, CenterPoint cleared 655 miles of high-risk vegetation near power lines, installed 1,215 automated reliability devices capable of self-healing, and added an additional 3,300 storm-resilient poles.

In April, CenterPoint will begin building a network of 100 new weather monitoring stations, which will provide 24/7 weather monitoring and storm response preparation.

“We will continue to work every day to complete these critical improvements as part of our company's goal of building the most resilient coastal grid in the country,” Carroll added in the release.

Georg Rute ,CEO of Gridraven, discusses the potential of AI and DLR. Photo via Getty Images

Energy expert: Unlocking the potential of the Texas grid with AI & DLR

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From bitter cold and flash flooding to wildfire threats, Texas is no stranger to extreme weather, bringing up concerns about the reliability of its grid. Since the winter freeze of 2021, the state’s leaders and lawmakers have more urgently wrestled with how to strengthen the resilience of the grid while also supporting immense load growth.

As Maeve Allsup at Latitude Media pointed out, many of today’s most pressing energy trends are converging in Texas. In fact, a recent ERCOT report estimates that power demand will nearly double by 2030. This spike is a result of lots of large industries, including AI data centers, looking for power. To meet this growing demand, Texas has abundant natural gas, solar and wind resources, making it a focal point for the future of energy.

Several new initiatives are underway to modernize the grid, but the problem is that they take a long time to complete. While building new power generation facilities and transmission lines is necessary, these processes can take 10-plus years to finish. None of these approaches enables both significantly expanded power and the transmission capacity needed to deliver it in the near future.

Beyond “curtailment-enabled headroom”

A study released by Duke University highlighted the “extensive untapped potential” in U.S. power plants for powering up to 100 gigawatts of large loads “while mitigating the need for costly system upgrades.” In a nutshell: There’s enough generating capacity to meet peak demand, so it’s possible to add new loads as long as they’re not adding to the peak. New data centers must connect flexibly with limited on-site generation or storage to cover those few peak hours. This is what the authors mean by “load flexibility” and “curtailment-enabled headroom.”

As I shared with POWER Magazine, while power plants do have significant untapped capacity, the transmission grid might not. The study doesn’t address transmission constraints that can limit power delivery where it’s needed. Congestion is a real problem already without the extra load and could easily wipe out a majority of that additional capacity.

To illustrate this point, think about where you would build a large data center. Next to a nuclear plant? A nuclear plant will already operate flat out and will not have any extra capacity. The “headroom” is available on average in the whole system, not at any single power plant. A peaking gas plant might indeed be idle most of the time, but not 99.5% of the time as highlighted by the Duke authors as the threshold. Your data center would need to take the extra capacity from a number of plants, which may be hundreds of miles apart. The transmission grid might not be able to cope with it.

However, there is also additional headroom or untapped potential in the transmission grid itself that has not been used so far. Grid operators have not been able to maximize their grids because the technology has not existed to do so.

The problem with existing grid management and static line ratings

Traditionally, power lines are given a static rating throughout the year, which is calculated by assuming the worst possible cooling conditions of a hot summer day with no wind. This method leads to conservative capacity estimates and does not account for environmental factors that can impact how much power can actually flow through a line.

Take the wind-cooling effect, for example. Wind cools down power lines and can significantly increase the capacity of the grid. Even a slight wind blowing around four miles per hour can increase transmission line capacity by 30 percent through cooling.

That’s why dynamic line ratings (DLR) are such a useful tool for grid operators. DLR enables the assessment of individual spans of transmission lines to determine how much capacity they can carry under current conditions. On average, DLR increases capacity by a third, helping utilities sell more power while bringing down energy prices for consumers.

However, DLR is not yet widely used. The core problem is that weather models are not accurate enough for grid operators. Wind is very dependent on the detailed landscape, such as forests or hills, surrounding the power line. A typical weather forecast will tell you the average conditions in the 10 square miles around you, not the wind speed in the forest where the power line is. Without accurate wind data at every section, even a small portion of the line risks overheating unless the line is managed conservatively.

DLR solutions have been forced to rely on sensors installed on transmission lines to collect real-time weather measurements, which are then used to estimate line ratings. However, installing and maintaining hundreds of thousands of sensors is extremely time-consuming, if not practically infeasible.

The Elering case study

Last year, my company, Gridraven, tested our machine learning-powered DLR system, which uses a AI-enabled weather model, on 3,100 miles of 110-kilovolt and 330-kilovolt lines operated by Elering, Estonia’s transmission system operator, predicting ratings in 15,000 individual locations. The power lines run through forests and hills, where conventional forecasting systems cannot predict conditions with precision.

From September to November 2024, our average wind forecast accuracy saw a 60 percent improvement over existing technology, resulting in a 40 percent capacity increase compared to the traditional seasonal rating. These results were further validated against actual measurements on transmission towers.

This pilot not only demonstrated the power of AI solutions against traditional DLR systems but also their reliability in challenging conditions and terrain.

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Georg Rute is the CEO of Gridraven, a software provider for Dynamic Line Ratings based on precision weather forecasting available globally. Prior to Gridraven, Rute founded Sympower, a virtual power plant, and was the head of smart grid development at Elering, Estonia's Transmission System Operator. Rute will be onsite at CERAWeek in Houston, March 10-14.

The views expressed herein are Rute's own. A version of this article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

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Houston's Rhythm Energy expands nationally with clean power acquisition

power deal

Houston-based Rhythm Energy Inc. has acquired Inspire Clean Energy for an undisclosed amount. The deal allows Rhythm to immediately scale outside of Texas and into the Northeast, Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions, according to a release from the company.

Inspire offers subscription-based renewable electricity plans to customers in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. By combining forces, Rhythm will now be one of the largest independent green-energy retailers in the country.

“Adding Inspire to the Rhythm family gives us the geographic reach to serve millions of new customers with the highly rated customer experience Texans already enjoy,” PJ Popovic, CEO of Rhythm, said in the release. “Together we become one of the largest independent green-energy retailers in the country and can roll out innovations like our PowerShift Time-of-Use plan and device-enabled demand-response programs that put customers fully in control of their energy costs.”

Rhythm was founded by Popovic in 2020 and offers 100 percent renewable energy plans using solar power, wind power and other renewable power sources.

In addition to scaling geographically, the acquisition will "(marry) Rhythm's data-driven technology with Inspire's successful subscription model." Rhythm also plans to upgrade its digital tools and provide more advanced services to help lower clean energy costs, according to the release.

Popovic spoke with EnergyCapital in 2023 about where he thinks renewables fit into Texas’s energy consumption. Read more here.

Fervo Energy lands $200 million in capital for new geothermal project

fresh funding

Houston-based Fervo Energy, a producer of geothermal power, has secured $205.6 million in capital to help finance its geothermal project in southern Utah.

The money will go toward the first and second phases of Cape Station, a geothermal energy plant being developed in Beaver County, Utah. Beaver County is roughly an equal distance between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas.

The $205.6 million in capital came from three sources:

  • $100 million in equity from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, a Kirkland, Washington-based platform that invests in emissions-reducing projects.
  • $60 million addition to Fervo’s existing loan from Mercuria, a Swiss energy and commodities trader. The revolving loan now totals $100 million.
  • $45.6 million in additional bridge debt financing from XRL-ALC, an affiliate of Irvington, New York-based X-Caliber Rural Capital. X-Caliber is a USDA-approved lender. The initial bridge loan was $100 million.

The first phase of Cape Station will supply 100 megawatts of carbon-free electricity to the power grid starting next year. Another 400 megawatts of capacity is supposed to go online by 2028. Fervo has permission to expand Cape Station’s capacity to as much as 2 gigawatts. On an annual basis, 2 gigawatts can supply enough electricity to power about 1.4 million homes.

“These investments demonstrate what we’ve known all along: Fervo’s combination of technical excellence, commercial readiness, and market opportunity makes us a natural partner for serious energy capital. The confidence our investors have in Fervo and in the Cape asset affirms that next-generation geothermal is ready to play a defining role in America’s energy future,” David Ulrey, Fervo’s CFO, said in a news release.