Interview: Jon Wellinghoff and Bill Flores on AI, the Grid, and What Texas Got Right

Filmed on the Stanford campus as part of OpenMinds' Grid Vision work, this interview features Managing Director Steve Lockard with Jon Wellinghoff, former Chairman of FERC and now Chief Regulatory Officer at Voltus, and Bill Flores, a former member of Congress who now chairs the ERCOT board. They discuss AI-driven load growth, what slows grid infrastructure and what other regions can learn from Texas.

Key points

• Flores says Texas took 100 years to build a grid that supports a peak load of about 95 gigawatts, and expects to add 50% of that in less than 5 years.
• ERCOT's 765,000-volt backbone plan, with supporting lines, will cost north of $30 billion over about 7 years.
• Wellinghoff points to 3,000 utilities, 500 transmission owners and 50 state jurisdictions as a system that moves slowly, and says Texas could lower prices through stronger interconnections with other regions.
• Both see momentum in demand flexibility: data centers acting as good grid citizens, Voltus's bring-your-own-capacity model and ERCOT's aggregated distributed energy resources pilot.