DENVER — The Trump administration, pending ERCOT market changes, the future of wind power generation and uses for artificial intelligence were recurrent themes at Yes Energy’s annual summit, EMPOWER 25, held March 5-7. Here’s some of what we heard.

Trump Administration Shakes Things up

Former FERC Chair Pat Wood III, CEO of Hunt Energy Network, was among the speakers expressing concern over President Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office.

“There’s a lot of things I like about the last six weeks, but some that I don’t, like taking treasured institutions and kind of hitting a wrecking ball to them. FERC is one of those,” he said. “I think FERC will be fine. I’ve seen the statements of the new chairman there being pretty supportive of being able to work all this out, and yet I know some quality people are leaving the organization, and I do worry about the loss of that institutional knowledge that has really made markets work seamlessly and work more effortlessly than they probably should have, because you had the right people there.”

Sonya Gustafson, general manager of data services for Equilibrium Energy, which uses AI to optimize energy portfolios, said she is concerned over the potential loss of data compiled by EPA, the Energy Information Administration and other federal agencies.

“One of my biggest challenges is access to as much information as possible; that allows us to create accurate renewable energy forecasts,” she said. “The threat of that going away does create a little bit of nervousness. We’re fortunate in that for weather, we can go potentially to European models, but at the same time, it does create a shift in our businesses. So that’s been top of mind recently: making sure I’m archiving as much as possible and finding secondary and third sources for a lot of the information we need to fully optimize.”

“The uncertainty is really high right now,” said Emma Konet, CTO of Tierra Climate, a marketplace for grid-scale batteries to sell carbon offsets to corporate buyers. “I think developers with projects in various stages of the interconnection queue are now a little bit uncertain about what the [investment tax credit] is going to look like — and maybe it’s going away.”

She said although falling battery costs have driven a lot of battery deployment in California and ERCOT, the ITC will be needed for widespread deployment in MISO and SPP. “So I definitely think that’s a risk.”

Leah Kaffine, senior director of integrated energy systems planning for Pattern Energy Group, which operates wind, solar, transmission and energy storage projects, expressed concern over the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy. “Pattern Energy, as a developer of transmission … we hope that maybe that will be spared,” she said.

Independent consultant Evan Bixby, former vice president of strategy and analytics for Pine Gate Renewables, said he is concerned over tariffs and supply chain risks. “Just the overall attitude of the federal government towards renewables is a little bit threatening,” he said. “I’m very confident in the renewable energy industry. It’s weathered storms before, and it’s a very creative, very passionate, very driven industry. So, [I’m] confident that we will be able to figure it out. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be headwinds.”

Anticipating ERCOT Market Changes

ERCOT’s real-time co-optimization and battery project (RTC+B), set to go live in December, was mentioned at the conference frequently.

“We’re in a little bit of purgatory right now,” said Drew Peine, vice president commercial for Hunt Energy Network, which is building energy storage in ERCOT.

“We’re going into this kind of unknown with RTC+B. You’ve got the day-ahead markets that are going to be financial, both energy and ancillary products, and then you’ve got that five-minute optimization on top of it. ERCOT is writing the rules as we speak. [It is] a little bit frustrating that we don’t have all the rules right now [that] we need to start, but we’re participating in that process with our regulatory team trying to understand what ASDC [ancillary service demand curve] is, first of all, and then what it means for our optimization. And … we need to be there on that Day 1.” (See ERCOT TAC Opens Discussion on Proposed RTC Changes.)

Gustafson predicted an “exciting” first couple months. “Whenever there’s new products launched, there’s more volatility. Later on, we may see slightly more depressed prices, but I’m excited for the first three or four months.”

“A lot of people, I don’t think, fully appreciate how dynamic this market’s going to be, and they’re going to be kind of stuck in their old ways,” Peine added.

“What’s really interesting is, once we get to real-time optimization, they have nothing to train on. We have no real-time price data for ancillary services,” Konet said. “So, I think that’s going to be a really interesting dynamic.”

Uses of Artificial Intelligence

AI isn’t just driving data center growth, speakers said. It’s also taking an increasing role in the work lives of power professionals.

“I think I spend more time talking to ChatGPT than to any human in my life right now,” Gustafson said. “It’s an awesome platform to learn, and it’s something that I use every day when I’m developing code. It makes me faster.”

“Asset optimization has been around forever. But I think where AI and [machine learning] and these kind of neural net type models can really come in is in the inputs to those optimizations,” Konet said.

Peine said AI will become increasingly important. “The amount of data that we consume is phenomenal; I just cannot believe how much data we consume on a daily basis,” he said.

Peter Kelly-Detwiler, co-founder of NorthBridge Energy Partners, said he uses Perplexity AI regularly — but still reads 44 newsletters, up from 42 with the recent addition of two on data centers.

“People have told me, ‘Why the heck do you read 42 newsletters — now 44 — and scan all that instead of teaching an AI tool to give you what you need?’ My answer is, I don’t trust yet that I’m going to ask it the right things to look for. And so much of my learning is still accidental.

“When I used to go into a library, the book that I was looking for was not the one that was usually the most valuable to me. It was next to it in the stack, in the adjacencies. And I still enjoy the accidental adjacency, because that’s when I find so many of the things I didn’t know were going to be valuable to me. And I’m afraid of taking my AI lens and making it so narrow that I build biases into it that exclude the broader world that I need to look at, especially for the data that’s going to come slamming into my head and destroy a paradigm that I thought I knew. I love when that happens.”

Future of Wind Generation

Wind development has fallen way behind solar in generation growth, but it will remain an important player, speakers said.

According to EIA, a record 30 GW of utility-scale solar was added to the U.S. grid in 2024, 61% of all capacity additions. Battery storage also hit a record last year, adding 10.3 GW. EIA predicts an additional 32.5 GW of utility-scale solar and 18.2 GW of utility-scale battery storage in 2025.

By contrast, wind added only 5.1 GW last year, the smallest amount since 2014, with slightly more (7.7 GW) expected in 2025.

“Wind is a lot harder to develop,” said Ryan Hakim, vice president of commercial and corporate strategy for independent power producer Cordelio Power. “You need a lot of acreage. … There’s a lot of things that can kind of go wrong. But if you are able to take a project to completion, there is quite a lot of demand for that product just because … it profiles generally the opposite of solar.”

“One of the reasons why we don’t see as much wind development is there’s a lot of sites that have been picked over,” he added. “But another thing to consider is, we’ve got more technology where you can build bigger turbines, higher towers; where you’re able to extract some of the wind in places where you previously hadn’t. And so I think there’s new regions that are also opening up.”

“Solar and batteries pretty quickly saturate themselves, whereas wind diversification as a species will always be highly valued,” agreed Kaffine. “And I think, yeah, people find it refreshing and different.”

“You can’t do it all with just one technology,” Bixby said. “You can’t do it all with solar and batteries. [You] probably could, but you need to overbuild by a lot. So you need wind in there. … You’ll need advanced geothermal. You’ll need new types of battery storage technology. You’ll need advanced controls to be able to manage all of it [and] new market mechanisms to pay for it.”

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