I developed a soft spot for Lionel Messi years ago while studying in Barcelona. Back then he seemed unstoppable, a diminutive player capable of dribbling the entire opposition at any given moment. Now 39, the magic comes less frequently, but there was still enough to power a series of frantic comebacks and take Argentina to the final. In the end the magic ran out, and the team was overrun by a Spanish side playing beautiful football. It was a poetic end, and perhaps a metaphor for an aging North American grid being challenged by a load wave that is just getting started.
The change is evident in the ERCOT congestion data and our August Congestion Revenue Right (CRR) outlook. If power is not your day job, grid congestion is traffic for electrons, priced as the gap between points on the grid, and CRRs are how you participate in the market.
Our work ran six load and weather scenarios across the state. The wire into the Dallas Fort Worth hyperscale corridor and the line feeding Lancium’s Abilene datacenter bound in all six. Bottlenecks usually need weather, which is the point of running the scenarios. These bind on load alone, because real energized megawatts, Riot’s 400 MW, Lancium’s 500 MW, sit behind a wire that is already full. Data center load is making congestion structural.
Meeting that load also takes new generation. Our supply-side screen scored 95 in-development ERCOT gas plants, about 60 GW, on deliverability and offtake. Only 16 clear the bar into Tiers 1 to 3, roughly 6 GW. The other 54 GW sits in Tier 4, mostly at Facility Study with no contracted buyer, because a gas plant does not get financed until a creditworthy load signs the PPA. A $2,500/kW CCGT needs roughly $70/MWh to pencil, and merchant revenue in an energy-only market does not get there. The buyer signs first. Everyone else waits in the queue.
So who benefits? LCRA owns the top of the table, with both Schneider RICE phases the only names at 77.5% and its Schneider CCGT and Lost Pines Recip close behind. Deliverability does the sorting, not size. Among listed IPPs, NRG’s Cedar Bayou 5 screens highest at 58.4% on a signed interconnection agreement, while the other 5 GW of NRG gas sits in Tier 4 with no offtake. VST’s Texas Gulf Sulphur scores 54.1% and is all of 16 MW. Headline gigawatts are the cheapest thing in this market.
PJM is the same match on a bigger pitch. PJM East spends $3.5 billion a year on transmission, the most in the nation, and congestion still moves the wrong way. The clocks explain why. Load arrives in three years, generation takes four to six, transmission takes ten.
The grid is Messi at 39, living on the magic that’s left, still capable for producing frantic comebacks. But the load wave is only warming up. Beautiful football is patient. It waits for the magic to run out.
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