How much new gas capacity does the Texas grid need?

ERCOT's low prices and slow merchant economics mean near-term dispatchable needs favor peakers and demand flexibility over new baseload combined-cycle gas.

• Record demand, rock-bottom prices: ERCOT hit a new all-time peak of over 91 gigawatts in August 2026, yet day-ahead on-peak prices averaged just $35.52/MWh, the lowest August since 2017.
• Peakers over baseload, for now: Constellation's David Dardis argues ERCOT needs peaking capacity, not new combined-cycle baseload, for the next five years, with ~430GW of large-load interconnection requests (mostly data centers) unlikely to materialize overnight.

Themes, sentiment and reasons are AI-written paraphrases, checked so they never quote an episode. They may contain errors. Not investment advice. Episodes remain the property of their creators.