Events not to miss, a new app launches for the energy industry, and more things to know this week. Photo via Getty Images

Editor's note: It's a new week — start it strong with three quick things to know in Houston's energy transition ecosystem. Meet the new leaders of ERCOT, an app you probably should download, and events not to miss this week.

Energy networking: There's an app for that

This Houston-based media company launched a networking platform to help solve the energy crisis. Screenshots via apps.apple.com

The Digital Wildcatters have created a platform for individuals to get their questions answered by experts and a space for companies seeking qualified talent. Collide is structured to ignite the next generation of energy innovators, as Collin McLelland, co-founder and CEO of Digital Wildcatters, tells EnergyCapital.

“If you look at what we’ve done historically with Digital Wildcatters, we’ve built an extremely engaged community of energy professionals — it’s a next generation community, very young forward thinking professionals that are working towards solving the world’s energy crisis,” McLelland says.

The roll out of Collide has been intentionally gradual, McLelland says because they want to shape the user experience based on feedback from ongoing focus groups. Currently they have about 1,000 users and are examining how they can make the app valuable to them before providing the platform to a wider audience.

McLelland says there are two major issues within the energy sector that Collide hopes to address — a lack of knowledge about energy verticals and difficulty recruiting talent.

“What we really see with our platform is being able to bring people together where if you want to find a piece of information, you need to find a subject matter expert, or if you want to find your next job, it happens on the Collide platform,” McLelland says. Read the full story.

Upcoming must-attend events to put on your radar

Two events this month the energy transition community needs to know about. Photos by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

  • September 14-15 — The Ninth Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas Conference will focus on digitalization, decarbonization, and innovation within the energy industry across five tracks: IoT, blockchain, digital twins, edge computing, and connectivity for upstream, midstream, and downstream operators.
  • September 21 — The Rice Alliance Energy Tech Venture Forum is an opportunity to learn about the latest emerging technologies, meet investors to seek funding, see promising companies, and more.

People to know this week

A quick who's who roundup from last week's EnergyCapital coverage. Photo via Getty Images

Missed some of EnergyCapital's news from last week? Catch up on who to know here.

  • The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, announced a reorganization amongst its leadership. Effective September 1, four ERCOT leaders have new titles and positions: Woody Rickerson has been named to the newly created position of senior vice president and COO; Kristi Hobbs, who previously served as vice president of corporate strategy and public utility commission relations, will replace Rickerson as vice president of system planning and weatherization and will report directly to Rickerson; Betty Day, vice president of security and compliance and chief compliance officer, has assumed oversight of business continuity; and Rebecca Zerwas will serve as director of state policy and public utility commission relations, board liaison. Read the full story.
  • Launched in 2022, The Texas Southern University Division for Research & Innovation is spearheading the institutions efforts in attaining the highest-tier classification for research in higher education institutions. Michelle Penn-Marshall, who serves as vice president for the division, recently sat down with the Houston Energy Transition Initiative to talk about the university’s mission to become a leader in research and the long-term goals for engaging students in the energy sector and advancing the energy transition. Read the full story.
  • With over a billion cars currently on the road — each with four tires that will eventually end up discarded, one Houstonian is hoping to create the infrastructure to sustainably dispose of tire waste now and into the future. Vibhu Sharma founded InnoVent Renewables to establish production facilities that utilize a proprietary continuous pyrolysis technology that is able to convert waste tires, plastics, and biomass into fuels and chemicals. In a Q&A with EnergyCapital, Sharma explains his plans to sustainably impact the tire waste space and his vision for his company. Read the full story.

ERCOT has made four leadership changes. Photo courtesy of ERCOT

ERCOT makes major leadership changes, names COO

reorganization

Last week, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, announced a reorganization amongst its leadership.

“These changes were designed to harness the collaborative talents and strengths of our experienced team in supporting the delivery of reliable and efficient energy to the millions of Texans that we serve,” Pablo Vegas, ERCOT President and CEO, says in a news release.

Effective September 1, four ERCOT leaders have new titles and positions.

Woody Rickerson has been named to the newly created position of senior vice president and COO of ERCOT. He previously served as vice president of system planning and weatherization. In his new role, he will maintain control over weatherization and planning while adding grid and commercial operations to his responsibilities.

“This new position will leverage Rickerson’s deep operations experience and support ERCOT’s continued investments in grid innovations,” adds Vegas.

Kristi Hobbs, who previously served as vice president of corporate strategy and public utility commission relations, will replace Rickerson as vice president of system planning and weatherization and will report directly to Rickerson. She will oversee transmission planning, generator interconnection activities, modeling, and weatherization in her new role.

ERCOT announced two other appointments:

  • Betty Day, vice president of security and compliance and chief compliance officer, has assumed oversight of business continuity.
  • Rebecca Zerwas will serve as director of state policy and public utility commission relations, board liaison.

“As our industry faces dynamic changes, ERCOT is continuously evolving and making the necessary improvements to the grid to support the needs of a growing population and robust economy," Vegas says. "This reorganization allows us to sharpen our focus on daily operations while implementing our long-term strategic plan."

Images via ERCOT.com

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UH's $44 million mass timber building slashed energy use in first year

building up

The University of Houston recently completed assessments on year one of the first mass timber project on campus, and the results show it has had a major impact.

Known as the Retail, Auxiliary, and Dining Center, or RAD Center, the $44 million building showed an 84 percent reduction in predicted energy use intensity, a measure of how much energy a building uses relative to its size, compared to similar buildings. Its Global Warming Potential rating, a ratio determined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, shows a 39 percent reduction compared to the benchmark for other buildings of its type.

In comparison to similar structures, the RAD Center saved the equivalent of taking 472 gasoline-powered cars driven for one year off the road, according to architecture firm Perkins & Will.

The RAD Center was created in alignment with the AIA 2030 Commitment to carbon-neutral buildings, designed by Perkins & Will and constructed by Houston-based general contractor Turner Construction.

Perkins & Will’s work reduced the building's carbon footprint by incorporating lighter mass timber structural systems, which allowed the RAD Center to reuse the foundation, columns and beams of the building it replaced. Reused elements account for 45 percent of the RAD Center’s total mass, according to Perkins & Will.

Mass timber is considered a sustainable alternative to steel and concrete construction. The RAD Center, a 41,000-square-foot development, replaced the once popular Satellite, which was a food, retail and hangout center for students on UH’s campus near the Science & Research Building 2 and the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication.

The RAD Center uses more than a million pounds of timber, which can store over 650 metric tons of CO2. Aesthetically, the building complements the surrounding campus woodlands and offers students a view both inside and out.

“Spaces are designed to create a sense of serenity and calm in an ecologically-minded environment,” Diego Rozo, a senior project manager and associate principal at Perkins & Will, said in a news release. “They were conceptually inspired by the notion of ‘unleashing the senses’ – the design celebrating different sights, sounds, smells and tastes alongside the tactile nature of the timber.”

In addition to its mass timber design, the building was also part of an Energy Use Intensity (EUI) reduction effort. It features high-performance insulation and barriers, natural light to illuminate a building's interior, efficient indoor lighting fixtures, and optimized equipment, including HVAC systems.

The RAD Center officially opened Phase I in Spring 2024. The third and final phase of construction is scheduled for this summer, with a planned opening set for the fall.

Experts on U.S. energy infrastructure, sustainability, and the future of data

Guest column

Digital infrastructure is the dominant theme in energy and infrastructure, real estate and technology markets.

Data, the byproduct and primary value generated by digital infrastructure, is referred to as “the fifth utility,” along with water, gas, electricity and telecommunications. Data is created, aggregated, stored, transmitted, shared, traded and sold. Data requires data centers. Data centers require energy. The United States is home to approximately 40% of the world's data centers. The U.S. is set to lead the world in digital infrastructure advancement and has an opportunity to lead on energy for a very long time.

Data centers consume vast amounts of electricity due to their computational and cooling requirements. According to the United States Department of Energy, data centers consume “10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building.” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory issued a report in December 2024 stating that U.S. data center energy use reached 176 TWh by 2023, “representing 4.4% of total U.S. electricity consumption.” This percentage will increase significantly with near-term investment into high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). The markets recognize the need for digital infrastructure build-out and, developers, engineers, investors and asset owners are responding at an incredible clip.

However, the energy demands required to meet this digital load growth pose significant challenges to the U.S. power grid. Reliability and cost-efficiency have been, and will continue to be, two non-negotiable priorities of the legal, regulatory and quasi-regulatory regime overlaying the U.S. power grid.

Maintaining and improving reliability requires physical solutions. The grid must be perfectly balanced, with neither too little nor too much electricity at any given time. Specifically, new-build, physical power generation and transmission (a topic worthy of another article) projects must be built. To be sure, innovative financial products such as virtual power purchase agreements (VPPAs), hedges, environmental attributes, and other offtake strategies have been, and will continue to be, critical to growing the U.S. renewable energy markets and facilitating the energy transition, but the U.S. electrical grid needs to generate and move significantly more electrons to support the digital infrastructure transformation.

But there is now a third permanent priority: sustainability. New power generation over the next decade will include a mix of solar (large and small scale, offsite and onsite), wind and natural gas resources, with existing nuclear power, hydro, biomass, and geothermal remaining important in their respective regions.

Solar, in particular, will grow as a percentage of U.S grid generation. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) reported that solar added 50 gigawatts of new capacity to the U.S. grid in 2024, “the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by an energy technology in over two decades.” Solar is leading, as it can be flexibly sized and sited.

Under-utilized technology such as carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) will become more prominent. Hydrogen may be a potential game-changer in the medium-to-long-term. Further, a nuclear power renaissance (conventional and small modular reactor (SMR) technologies) appears to be real, with recent commitments from some of the largest companies in the world, led by technology companies. Nuclear is poised to be a part of a “net-zero” future in the United States, also in the medium-to-long term.

The transition from fossil fuels to zero carbon renewable energy is well on its way – this is undeniable – and will continue, regardless of U.S. political and market cycles. Along with reliability and cost efficiency, sustainability has become a permanent third leg of the U.S. power grid stool.

Sustainability is now non-negotiable. Corporate renewable and low carbon energy procurement is strong. State renewable portfolio standards (RPS) and clean energy standards (CES) have established aggressive goals. Domestic manufacturing of the equipment deployed in the U.S. is growing meaningfully and in politically diverse regions of the country. Solar, wind and batteries are increasing less expensive. But, perhaps more importantly, the grid needs as much renewable and low carbon power generation as possible - not in lieu of gas generation, but as an increasingly growing pairing with gas and other technologies. This is not an “R” or “D” issue (as we say in Washington), and it's not an “either, or” issue, it's good business and a physical necessity.

As a result, solar, wind and battery storage deployment, in particular, will continue to accelerate in the U.S. These clean technologies will inevitably become more efficient as the buildout in the U.S. increases, investments continue and technology advances.

At some point in the future (it won’t be in the 2020s, it could be in the 2030s, but, more realistically, in the 2040s), the U.S. will have achieved the remarkable – a truly modern (if not entirely overhauled) grid dependent largely on a mix of zero and low carbon power generation and storage technology. And when this happens, it will have been due in large part to the clean technology deployment and advances over the next 10 to 15 years resulting from the current digital infrastructure boom.

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Hans Dyke and Gabbie Hindera are lawyers at Bracewell. Dyke's experience includes transactions in the electric power and oil and gas midstream space, as well as transactions involving energy intensive industries such as data storage. Hindera focuses on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and public and private capital market offerings.

Rice researchers' quantum breakthrough could pave the way for next-gen superconductors

new findings

A new study from researchers at Rice University, published in Nature Communications, could lead to future advances in superconductors with the potential to transform energy use.

The study revealed that electrons in strange metals, which exhibit unusual resistance to electricity and behave strangely at low temperatures, become more entangled at a specific tipping point, shedding new light on these materials.

A team led by Rice’s Qimiao Si, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Physics and Astronomy, used quantum Fisher information (QFI), a concept from quantum metrology, to measure how electron interactions evolve under extreme conditions. The research team also included Rice’s Yuan Fang, Yiming Wang, Mounica Mahankali and Lei Chen along with Haoyu Hu of the Donostia International Physics Center and Silke Paschen of the Vienna University of Technology. Their work showed that the quantum phenomenon of electron entanglement peaks at a quantum critical point, which is the transition between two states of matter.

“Our findings reveal that strange metals exhibit a unique entanglement pattern, which offers a new lens to understand their exotic behavior,” Si said in a news release. “By leveraging quantum information theory, we are uncovering deep quantum correlations that were previously inaccessible.”

The researchers examined a theoretical framework known as the Kondo lattice, which explains how magnetic moments interact with surrounding electrons. At a critical transition point, these interactions intensify to the extent that the quasiparticles—key to understanding electrical behavior—disappear. Using QFI, the team traced this loss of quasiparticles to the growing entanglement of electron spins, which peaks precisely at the quantum critical point.

In terms of future use, the materials share a close connection with high-temperature superconductors, which have the potential to transmit electricity without energy loss, according to the researchers. By unblocking their properties, researchers believe this could revolutionize power grids and make energy transmission more efficient.

The team also found that quantum information tools can be applied to other “exotic materials” and quantum technologies.

“By integrating quantum information science with condensed matter physics, we are pivoting in a new direction in materials research,” Si said in the release.